Game's End

by Kevin J. Anderson

  "Pick a number between one and five," Bryl said.

  "Two."

  "The pillar is starting to crack."

  "I'm still swinging."

  "You can feel the grubs moving inside you. They're chewing at your spine. Soon you're going to collapse," Drodanis said.

  "I'm swinging again. And again!"

  "Pick another number. Between one and four this time."

  "Three."

  "Oh, let him have it, Bryl."

  "The pillar cracks more. The ceiling is starting to fissure. Water is trickling down. By now the worm-men know what you're doing, and they hurry forward. You have another strike, maybe two, with your sword before it's too late."

  "I'm swinging again."

  Bryl laughed. "The pillar breaks. The ceiling is crumbling. Water gushes down. The worm-men are running about, frantic."

  "Do I have time for ― "

  "You have no time. The grubs have just eaten your heart. The last thing your eyes see is the ceiling collapsing, and the great explosion of water thundering down."

  The storehouse training always disturbed Bryl. It seemed so real to the characters, this role-playing game. He was glad it remained just a game. Vailret continued to walk in silence.

  But suddenly the side walls of the catacombs flaked outward, and Bryl heard scratching, clawing noises.

  "What's going on?" Vailret said. Bryl's hand-light bobbed against the ceiling.

  The packed-earth walls split open. Mud-covered, smooth-skinned werem burst out on either side, reaching out. Bryl stepped back, stifling a scream.

  He felt a lump on the floor, and a clawed hand snapped out to grab his thin ankle. He kicked and squealed, stomping down on the worm-man's wrist. The whole creature emerged, rising higher and flinging mud off its chest and limbs.

  The worm-men trapped them, front and back.

  "Use the Stones, Bryl! The Fire Stone ― now!"

  Bryl grabbed both Stones out of his cloak. He held the diamond and ruby in his hand, gripping the sharp corners.

  But his hand refused to drop the Stones. His arm remained locked into place. He strained as much as he could, but it didn't seem to be his own hand at all.

  "Roll them!" Vailret said.

  The worm-men made wet clicking sounds as they slithered forward, not in any hurry at all. Their sightless eyes turned toward the captives.

  "I can't! I can't move my arm!" Bryl said.

  Vailret tried to turn toward him, but he froze as well. His legs locked. Vailret's neck muscles twitched and jerked as he strained ― but something else held onto him, controlled their every action.

  "It's the same thing that's attacking Sitnalta!" Vailret said through clenched teeth. "The invisible force, it's got us now!"

  As they remained motionless, with legs together, Vailret and Bryl could offer no resistance as the werem picked them up. They glided down the bore of the tunnels, moving with a caterpillar-like motion that made Bryl feel sick. He found that his body cooperated enough to let him shiver.

  Ahead, they saw two other werem widening a hole in the side of the passage. Bryl's fireball bobbed along behind them.

  As their captors reached the other worm-men, they stopped and plucked Vailret and Bryl from their segmented backs. They placed their captives on the dirt floor inside the grave-sized hole they had dug. The werem seemed to be clicking and chattering among themselves.

  One of them turned, bent down with a liquid motion, and snatched up Vailret and Bryl, stuffing them into the hole.

  Paralyzed, Bryl could do nothing but slump against Vailret and watch as the hideous blank-eyed figure of one werem leaned forward, filling the opening with his silhouette. He reached forward with one four-fingered hand.

  "The Master will make good use of these," the werem said in a scratchy, hollow voice. He snatched the Air Stone and the Fire Stone out of Bryl's locked grasp.

  The fireball illuminating the tunnels winked out, leaving them in complete blackness.

  Bryl could only hear the worm-men moving and chittering. They slathered dirt as they built up the tunnel wall again, piling it back inside the cell. They walled Vailret and Bryl into the chamber, without food, without light, without air.

  ――――

  Chapter 21

  SARDUN'S VAULTS

  "She is our future! Tareah is the last full-blooded Sorcerer woman. Our race will rise again. She will shepherd them back to us, to make things the way they were."

  ― Sardun the Sentinel

  Delrael's army exhibited an odd mixture of remembered horror from their first battle and nervous frivolity from considering themselves safe in the ice fortress. Many characters slumped against the ice blocks, tucked a blanket behind them, and fell deep into a numb sleep.

  Siya took great pains to provide an extra large and well-prepared meal for them all. She moved about as if in a daze, staring at the fighters, especially the wounded ones; something seemed to be working in the back of her mind since she had watched Drodanis die.

  Tareah did what she could to help. The Ice Palace felt so different with a human army inside. She remembered Sardun's little touches, his pennants and ice intaglios along the walls. Neither she or Enrod had been able to add unnecessary embellishments, so the great banquet chamber seemed larger and colder than it should have.

  Enrod came up to her and stood, wanting to say something. She noticed him, but did not encourage conversation. She felt uncomfortable around him and his disjointed madness. He looked up at the vaulted ceilings and around the ice fortress.

  "Tareah," he said. His voice sounded calm, but his expression took on a harder appearance. "Sardun said harsh things." He stared down a corridor, then flinched at something she couldn't see. "Unfair to me."

  Tareah tried to keep any emotion out of her answer. "My father didn't like you. Apparently he never considered the feud finished. He was upset because you abandoned your heritage."

  Enrod's heavy eyebrows knitted together. "Not abandoned! I stayed! After the Transition, after all the Sorcerers ran away, I stayed! I used my abilities to help human characters. Help them! Sardun ― lived too much in the past. More important work to do."

  Enrod drew a deep breath and ran his fingernails along the ice blocks of the wall, shaving off a thin line of white. "I used my power. I offered my assistance. We built Taire."

  He lowered his gaze. The ice shaving melted on his fingertips. "We owed humans that much. We created their character race for our wars. We gave them Gamearth already broken. I helped fix it."

  Though Enrod's hair remained dark and his beard bushy, Tareah could see how truly old the Sentinel was. He had lived nearly as many years as Sardun, a full generation more than Bryl, and for several generations of human characters.

  "I should become the Allspirit," he said, surprising her. "Me."

  Tareah looked at Enrod, wondering how he had reached that conclusion.

  "I would lose nothing, and I ― " He paused, and she saw the deep pain on his face. "I know how power can hurt. What kind of Allspirit would Bryl make? Not even a pure Sorcerer. Tainted! Tainted!" He took a deep breath then blew it out, seeing steam in the cold air wafting upward like smoke.

  "A full-blooded Sorcerer should make the last Transition. I am the only one left."

  Enrod seemed to be speaking to himself. Tareah shook her head and felt her hair flowing behind her neck. "So am I, Enrod. Why does everyone always forget about me?"

  Enrod blinked at her. "Sardun kept you locked away."

  Tareah felt angry now. No matter how much she did, they all continued to take her lightly, even the people on her own side.

  "My father had his own reasons for protecting me, regardless of whether you or I agree with them. He isn't here now, and I make my own decisions."

  Enrod shrugged.

  In the large hall, Siya continued her work of cleaning weapons, sitting by herself. The other non-fighter human characters tended the wounded soldiers and helped the army bed down.

 
"Do me one thing, for the memory of my father," Tareah said. She pointed at Enrod. "He was upset because you never once came here to see the history he had compiled. Go to the vaults yourself. Look at what he kept from past turns.

  "You insist on looking toward the future, and that's good. But the past might hold some surprises for you, too. Go to the vaults. You might be impressed."

  Enrod drew himself up and looked at her with his ageless eyes. "I will." With a slight bow, he stepped backward and walked away. As he moved, he drew his fingernail along the wall.

  Tareah held the Water Stone in her hands, thinking about what else Enrod had said. She already knew what she had to do.

  Tareah tried to sleep. She lay in a re-creation of her old chambers. With her mind and her imagination she had rebuilt the room exactly as she remembered it, making the same polished furnishings, the same frost-intaglios in the walls, even to the single narrow window that now looked out upon the massed and huddling monster army on the ice-packed desolation. She could see only three or four small fires out there, apparently made with their limited supply of wood.

  Delrael's army would be asleep by now, except for a few sentries she could easily avoid.

  Tareah wandered the blue-ice corridors again, just as she had always done when she couldn't sleep. During the day the walls shimmered with rainbows from the sunlight; at night she saw only dark and refracted starshine. As a girl, sometimes she listened to her father tell legends that she already knew by heart.

  That reminded her of the way she and Vailret had swapped stories back into the Stronghold village. She thought of Vailret and Bryl and how far away they must be. Surely by now they had managed to get the Earth Stone ― but how would they know to come all the way up here to the Ice Palace? They were supposed to locate the human army somewhere in the mountains. Originally, Delrael had planned to send regular scouts to search for them returning. Now, though, even if Vailret and Bryl did happen to come up here, how could they ever get past the tight cordon of monsters?

  They could do enormous damage with the three Stones, blasting their way in ― but Bryl was only one magic user ... and spells could fail.

  Tareah stopped and shivered from a cold that didn't come from the ice corridors. What if Bryl didn't succeed? What if all three Stones passed into the hands of the manticore? Normally she would have doubted that any monster could bear a taint of Sorcerer blood, but the ogre Gairoth had proven otherwise.

  In the last days of the old Sorcerers, their race had been weak. They mated with the humans, trying to regain their fading magic; some of them, more desperate, had interbred with a few of their more horrendous creations. Who could say that in all of Siryyk's horde not one monster could bring magic from the Stones?

  It was a foolish risk to take, she knew. Delrael, with his constant overprotection of her, had certainly lectured enough about senseless risks.

  She descended a narrow staircase and got to the ground level of the ice fortress. The human army could survive a long seige within the battlements. They had many supplies, and Enrod could always replenish them.

  Winter had fallen on the northern hexes, and even without the Water Stone's magic, the fortress would remain frozen for months. Tareah had done all she could here.

  The need was greater elsewhere.

  She slipped out a low side arch, one of the doorways Enrod had added for brief surprise strikes and retreats. He hadn't expected her to be the first character to use it.

  Under a few stars that stood in black patches of night around clumps of clouds, Tareah approached the western wall of the defenses. Most of Siryyk's horde lay camped along the opposite side, but that didn't mean other sentries wouldn't be stationed around the fortress.

  After midnight her allotment of spells had been replenished, and now Tareah took out the Water Stone. She rolled the sapphire on the ground but got only a "3." Though she felt the magic surging through her, the dayid must not be helping her this time. It did not want her to take the Water Stone away.

  She walked forward into the wall.

  The ice clarified and puddled around her hands, turning into water as she stepped through the blocks. The water shimmered and sealed behind her, refreezing as she stepped through. The ice trickled away in front of her, and she emerged on the other side.

  Cold water dripped from her garments and her long hair, but a thought through the Water Stone left her warm again. Tareah called up a thick night fog to cover her movements from any monsters that might be patrolling the area.

  She hurried across the snow, following her ears to the Barrier River, which lay only half a hex away. Her body felt refreshed and tingling from touching so much magic in so little time. But this would be only the beginning. She covered the distance in less than an hour.

  At last, after all her studying of the Game and its legends, she had embarked on her own adventure.

  Tareah stood on the hex-line where the rushing water poured through from the northern sea, gushing among the rocks and frothing with chunks of ice. Tareah fashioned a wide, flat raft of solid transparent ice that showed the water foaming beneath it in large bubbles. She stepped onto her raft, squatted down in the center, and detached it from the black hex-line of the shore.

  With a lurch, her raft pushed southward, reeling away at the speed of the current, bouncing and twisting. She dug her fingers into the ice, melting handholds for herself. The raft swirled, and as the Water Stone spell continued, she called up waves in the current.

  Giant blue hands of froth and spray rose up, one after another in a flurry, pushing the raft and then dissolving into the water again. A constant stream of the watery hands shoved her faster and faster, doubling the speed of the current so that the raft skipped and bounced over the river surface.

  Tareah's hair whipped behind her, and she couldn't stop herself from laughing. The dim hexes of the shore sped past, blurry and dizzying at her rate of movement. The watery hands pushed and slapped her along.

  She had two more spells to last the rest of the night. By morning she would be many, many hexagons away.

  Enrod carried a flickering torch ― a torch, because he had used all his spells that day in rebuilding the fortress. The flames hissed and crackled. He held his hand near the fire to feel its warmth. The light glinted and flared along the ice stalactites.

  He wandered among the museum Sardun had spent his lifetime compiling. Tareah's father had sent out human Scavengers, paying them for any relic they could uncover of the old Sorcerers, jewels or manuscripts or weapons or tiny keepsakes ― anything to legitimize his collection.

  Sardun had annotated each object. Enrod found the blackened swords of two old Sorcerer generals, apparently the actual pair that the commanders had thrown into Stilvess Peacemaker's death pyre. Or was it some other pyre? Enrod couldn't remember.

  Even before the fall of the Ice Palace, Sardun seemed to know that his museum would collapse, and he had taken great pains to preserve everything. Glowing protection wards and shielding fields hovered around all the relics. Though Enrod was the first to set foot in these restored vaults, everything seemed pristine, as it always must have been.

  The vault spread out to the edges of the torchlight. Under a low ceiling in the far end he saw ranks of bodies positioned side by side with great reverence. These were the empty, dormant bodies of the old Sorcerers.

  Most of the race had gathered together in the broad valley, Stilvess and other Sorcerer commanders sat in their tent, rolling and rolling dice until they achieved an impossible, perfect roll that would set off the Transition. All the old Sorcerers had waited there, except those who had chosen to remain behind like Enrod and Sardun.

  After the Transition had worked and the lives of all the old Sorcerers had forged together into the Earthspirits and the Deathspirits, they had left their physical bodies behind, empty and dormant ― not dead, but not alive.

  Sardun and the others had carried all of the bodies here and erected the Ice Palace as their monument. Over the
years, Sardun arranged the figures, labeling each one with the name they had carried in life.

  Enrod stood in the oppressive closeness of the vaults. He could imagine the long, slow intake of breath, perhaps only once every minute or two as the old Sorcerers inhaled in unison, then let out an equally interminable exhale. Their heartbeats seemed to echo like distant, widely spaced drumbeats: a faint thump, a long, long pause, and then a smaller thump.

  Enrod thought about Sardun's demise. He could feel the dayid, he could feel all the lives of the Sentinels who had vanished in the interim years, calling upon the half-Transition to destroy themselves when they could no longer tolerate their lives. The voices whispered louder in his head.

  Enrod looked out at the tomb of the undead Sorcerers and wondered if this was what they really wanted.

  He turned away then and poked among the relics for a last few moments. In a small, unimpressive container he found the spell for invoking and commanding a gargoyle, one of the stone creatures formed by a single Sentinel's wandering spirit.

  Enrod looked at the spell, realizing that it could be useful. Below it he found written a single name for the gargoyle to be summoned: ARKEN.

  The next morning Delrael awoke refreshed and tingling with a new energy. The Game had turned in his favor, and he felt eager for it now.

  His father had fallen in the battle, but Delrael could make it up to him if he won the war, if he saved Gamearth ― as Drodanis had charged him long ago in the Rulewoman's message-stick.

  His army could rest and recuperate here. The fighters could strike at the horde whenever the monsters approached too close. Delrael had only to wait ― Vailret and Bryl held the key to the next step, the end game.

  Delrael arose at first light and, before his other fighters could stir, he walked along the ice corridors and climbed one of the tall turrets to look out over the frozen desolation. The last scraps of an unusual morning fog blew away with the dawn.

  On top he met one shivering sentry, a woman whose hair had blown about and tangled in the night breezes; she looked as if she had reached the limits of what she could endure. The cold air snapped the last of Delrael's weariness away as he stood beside the sentry.