Game's End

by Kevin J. Anderson

  David grabbed his arm. "You don't know what you're doing."

  Tyrone jerked away. "Quit telling me what to do! It's my turn, and I'm rolling."

  "Don't!" Scott shouted.

  Tyrone tossed the crystalline die on the carpet. It came to rest by the edge of the map, showing a perfect "20." Gamearth definitely wanted him in.

  Tyrone vanished.

  Scott stood with his mouth wide and gaping. Melanie let out a gasp, choking in a quick breath. David hung his head.

  "What do we do now?" Scott whispered.

  The snow under his feet felt real and wet and cold. Tyrone wore only his socks.

  The air smelled different, biting and clean. The afternoon sun shone bright in his eyes after the artificial light of the fireplace and the lamps in David's family room.

  "Wow!" he said, looking up into the sky with astonishment. He didn't even notice the wind through his thin shirt. "It worked!"

  He turned and saw the magnificent ice fortress, glinting like something out of Disneyland. Tyrone kept making unintelligible sounds of disbelief.

  He saw the marching ranks of old Sorcerers coming toward him, exactly as he had pictured them in his mind. All four of the players must have had the same visions to create something as real as this. "Wait'll I get back and tell them about this!"

  Then he heard the shouting and the din of drawn weapons. He whirled to see the monster horde charging at him.

  His nightmarish visions of reptilian monsters and sharp teeth and pointed blades had been only pale outlines of what he saw now. Even the most spectacular movie special effects had never been able to hint at the hideousness of these alien creatures.

  They saw Tyrone and surged in his direction.

  But he had created them. The monster horde with all its evil fighters were his own characters. He had moved them about, played them, used them to strike on the campaign. "Stop!" he said. But none of them noticed.

  Too late, Tyrone realized that he should run.

  The air in the family room made a wet, hissing sound, like rain falling on hot metal. Then Tyrone's body reappeared.

  He sprawled on the carpet, not moving. Blood oozed from a hundred separate stab wounds. His battered face and open, staring eyes held an expression of profound disbelief.

  Melanie screamed and shrank away.

  Scott retched, grabbing some old newspapers in a useless gesture to protect the floor as he vomited. His glasses fell off as he stumbled to the kitchen. David heard the water running.

  He knelt down beside Tyrone and rolled him over to expose the horrible gashes that tore open his chest and abdomen. He saw no use in checking for a pulse, but he did anyway. "He's dead."

  Scott stood by the entrance to the family room, shaking. Without his glasses he appeared strangely vulnerable. "It's just a game! It's just a game, dammit!" His voice had a thin, whining tone. "What are we going to do? We can't keep playing a stupid game! Tyrone's dead!"

  Melanie looked at David, and he felt a kind of communion between them. She glared at the map of Gamearth as if it had betrayed her.

  "It's not a game," David said. He held one of the crystalline dice in his hand. Tyrone's blood still clung to his fingers and smeared on the transparent facets of the die.

  "It's war. And I'm going to put an end to it all."

  ――――

  Chapter 24

  WEREM GROTTO

  "Characters must never give up. That is not one of our options. We have a responsibility to the Game, and that goes beyond our wish for despair."

  ― Enrod, on the second rebuilding of Taire

  Vailret felt trapped in a cell darker than the darkest night imaginable. The packed dirt was gritty and damp against his skin, caked in his hair. His fingers throbbed and stung from trying to claw out of the grave. The air grew thick and stifling, liquid with dust and dampness from their own respiration.

  He had too little room to move. Next to him, Bryl had given up in despair. "We lost the Stones!" Bryl moaned. "All three of them. Everything's useless now."

  "We failed in a big way," Vailret muttered.

  After the werem had packed the walls down tight, the invisible force had abandoned Vailret and Bryl, leaving them free to move, but with nowhere to go.

  "They're going to come back and plant their larvae in us," Bryl said in the total darkness. "I just know it."

  Vailret could hear the half-Sorcerer's teeth chattering together. "Or they'll just leave us here to suffocate," he said. He kept trying to scrape at the wall, but the werem had done something to the dirt and it seemed hard as dried mortar.

  "If I still had the Fire Stone, I could blast us out of here," Bryl said.

  "You'd probably burn us, too."

  Vailret knew that Bryl had few other spells on his own without the crutch of the Stones. He tried to remember which ones Bryl knew ― he could keep blades sharp or make them dull, or he could make flowers open prematurely. Neither of those seemed particularly useful at the moment.

  Vailret stopped digging at the hard wall. He turned toward Bryl in the darkness. "You can still use your spell to replenish supplies, right?"

  "Yes," Bryl replied, "but we're going to run out of air long before we starve to death."

  "No!" Vailret felt excitement rising within him again. "Create water ― within the dirt wall. You can make the whole wall like soup, and we can just crawl through the mud."

  From Bryl's silence, Vailret could tell he was thinking about the possibility. "I don't see why not," he said. "Any other time I can direct the water into casks and bottles. I should be able to direct it into the middle of this wall."

  "Then do it, Bryl!"

  Bryl squirmed, jabbing Vailret with his elbow. Vailret tried to push his chest against the packed dirt, giving the half-Sorcerer as much room as he could. Bryl mumbled something, flailed his hands. "Well, I just rolled one of my dice, but I can't see what number I got."

  But Vailret heard water trickling and running. His hands and chest suddenly felt drenched.

  "It worked!" Bryl said. "See if you can push through."

  Vailret extended his hands. The earth turned soft, into muck, and gave way. Vailret strained and moved forward.

  Bryl shoved at his back. "Go on!"

  Vailret swooped with his hands, swimming through mud like cold, sticky gravy as he clawed onward. He thrust his head into the opening, still tunneling. He held his breath, puffing his cheeks out and trying to clench his nostrils shut. Then, with a cough and a gasp, he burst through the wall as it slumped away, falling into a puddle on the floor.

  He splashed and rolled out, falling to his knees on the floor, sucking in great gasps of breath. Cold brown slime covered his hands and hair and face and clothes. He choked and then started laughing.

  Bryl stumbled out and fell beside him. Everything remained dark and dank. He heard only the dripping slump of the waterlogged mud.

  "Good job, Bryl," Vailret said.

  Bryl muttered beside him, a disembodied voice in the blackness. "So now what do we do?"

  Vailret sat against a firm portion of the opposite wall. The question had not occurred to him, but the only answer seemed obvious. "We go ahead with our plan."

  "But we're defenseless! The werem took our Stones."

  Vailret scowled at Bryl, who could not see his expression anyway, but he thought the cool tone in his voice would get the point across. "So? They can't use the Stones. I can't even use them. You need Sorcerer blood. You saw how the werem took the gems from Tryos's treasure. They must be just keeping them somewhere. We need to get them back."

  "Are you sure that's all they're doing with them?"

  "No," Vailret answered. "But we don't have any choice." His voice became hard-edged, and he thought Delrael would have been proud at his commanding tone. "If you and I fail to get those Stones back, and if we can't succeed in making the Allspirit, then Gamearth is doomed. We don't have any right to give up, whether we want to or not. Now make some light for us and le
t's go on."

  Bryl used another minor spell to conjure up a small glow that lit their way. Vailret and Bryl stared at each other, shocked at their wide-eyed, mud-spattered appearance, and tried to refrain from laughing or sobbing at how pitiful they looked.

  "Remember," Vailret said, "this is all supposed to be fun."

  They traveled for days, it seemed. The werem tunnel continued under the earth, wide and straight; occasionally they found disused side passages. They had been so long out of the light and away from other landmarks that Vailret had no idea which direction they headed.

  Around a sharp bend, they found another alcove scraped out of the side wall. As the bobbing insubstantial light cast shadows on the sloping walls, Vailret at first thought three enemies lay waiting to spring on them. But as the glow fell on the figures, Vailret saw that these characters, sprawled in an uncovered grave, would never move again.

  Bryl shuddered. Vailret leaned forward to see the horrifying corpses dressed in what appeared to be Sitnaltan clothes. They looked mummified, drained, and somehow broken, as if they had been devoured from the inside out. Their eye sockets were gaping, jagged holes, showing an empty skull where something had burst through the sockets. The joints looked broken; the chests had cracked outward.

  Bryl turned sick and gray. "The larvae got them. That's what werem do. They plant their grubs on humans so they can eat their way out." He let the silence hang for a moment. "They're probably going to do that to us."

  "If they catch us again." Vailret felt queasy. "But they only seemed interested in the Stones."

  He put a finger to his lip, grimaced, then spat dried mud out of his mouth. "The invisible force in Sitnalta always seemed to be after us, when it made Dirac come with the car, when we tried to get away in Frankenstein's balloon. I wonder if this werem Master was trying to take our Stones from the start."

  "Well, it got what it wanted," Bryl said.

  "So we have to take the Stones back."

  The side tunnels branched out more and more as they continued, until the hexagon seemed honeycombed with passages. Bryl's light illuminated only a small area around them, and they could see nothing but blackness ahead and behind. Vailret began to wonder what exactly they would do when they came upon the werem.

  The passage widened, and Vailret could hear clicking and trickling sounds. A diffuse glow flickered ahead, beyond the range of Bryl's light.

  "Walk slower, Bryl," he whispered. "We don't know what this might be."

  But before the half-Sorcerer could respond, two werem slithered out of side passages behind them. Bryl bit back a gasp, letting only a small whimper escape.

  A shadow appeared in the glow ahead, the silhouette of a burly werem, nearly half again as large as any they had seen. Vailret felt afraid to move. "Nothing we can do," he said to Bryl.

  "We can be captured," Bryl said.

  "Besides that."

  The large werem came forward. In the uncertain glow light, Vailret saw complicated insignia tattooed on his chest and shoulders; gashes of ornamental scars stood out on his cheeks below staring white eyes.

  The werem spoke with a hollow, inhuman voice. "Master has been waiting for you."

  The worm-man turned around at his waist and flowed back the way he had come. His long segmented body looped around and trailed after, dripping lubricating slime. The two werem behind them extended their clawed hands and prodded the mud-spattered backs of Vailret and Bryl.

  The confining passage dropped away as they stepped into a huge grotto with wide echoing walls. Scores of them dug down into warrens as werem moved together in a swarming nest.

  Thick, cement-hard support columns rose like fused stalactites from floor to ceiling, propping up the grotto. Sharp, bright clusters of crystals, clear, pink, and pale blue, protruded like ornaments from the walls. Gems studded other sections of the dirt, glinting and half-hidden as if the werem had planted them there. The chamber carried a crystalline sheen, a glow sparkling off everything, which the blind werem could never see.

  In the center of the grotto floor, stood the sculpture of a gigantic outstretched hand, fingers extended and palm upward. Fashioned out of mud the same color as the walls and floor, it was large as a banquet table, perhaps an altar of some kind. In the middle of the cupped palm, Vailret saw the sparkling colors of the four-sided diamond Air Stone, the eight-sided ruby Fire Stone, and a perfect egg-sized ten-sided emerald ― the Earth Stone.

  "There it is!" Bryl said.

  Vailret flicked his glance around, checking the positions of the other werem in the grotto. The guardians behind him had halted at the entrance to the grotto. He wondered if he could rush forward and snatch the Stones, tossing them to Bryl, so that he could blast their way out with the Fire Stone. He tensed. They didn't seem to have any other choice. Vailret just hoped that Bryl could react fast enough.

  Then the fingers of the giant clay hand trembled, as if loosening up. Then they curled together into a fist, closing down and covering the three Stones.

  The far wall of the grotto wavered and shifted. The dirt and mud and clay became liquid, reforming as if something behind the wall was pushing its way to the surface.

  Then a huge human head emerged, made of mud and protruding through the membrane of the wall. Vailret saw the eyes, the forehead, nose and chin emerge ― a face as large as a Sitnaltan building.

  The worm-men in the grotto focused their attention on the moving face. Gems and crystals popped out of the wall, discarded as the dirt convulsed. The werem hissed and swayed. They muttered the same word over and over again: "Master! Master!"

  The clay smoothed, and distinctive features appeared on the cheeks, the eyelids, the lips. Vailret even noticed faint tracings of hair on the eyebrows, forehead, and beside the ears. It was a young face, a male face, and it seemed angry at something.

  He had seen this face before as just a distorted glimpse long ago, when he had looked through the scattered lenses from Paenar's eye-staff and caught a distant reflection of the Outside Players.

  This was the visage of the Outsider David.

  "Master!" the werem whispered.

  "You're not my master!" Vailret said. He stood defiant. Bryl looked at him in astonishment.

  The enormous earthen face scowled at them, then the flexible lips curled up in a smile as wide as a fissure in the earth. "The one you called the Stranger Unlooked-For was Melanie's 'Apprentice.' Her 'Journeyman' succeeded in destroying Scartaris.

  "But I am Master. I have the Stones." The clay hand in the middle of the floor pushed up and opened again to display them.

  "You can't win against the Outside. You're just characters in a Game. Our Game. We created you. You can't fight us."

  The face pushed farther out of the wall. Vailret resisted his impulse to cringe.

  "I ruined Sitnalta so they can find no solution. My manticore holds Verne's ultimate weapon."

  The clay face let the smile broaden. "Delrael's troops are trapped in the ice fortress and can't do anything but annoy my monster army." He paused, and the echoes of his last words rumbled in the grotto. The worm-men stared with rapt attention.

  "And you are here," David said. "In my grasp."

  Another huge clay hand formed out of the side grotto wall and thrust toward them with blinding speed, knocking werem out of the way as it snatched both Vailret and Bryl in clay fingers.

  The massive arm lifted them off the ground. Vailret's arms and legs were pinned in the powerful grip. The fist pulled them across the grotto, sliding without a ripple through the dirt floor. It held them directly in front of the enormous, frightening face.

  As the David visage opened its mouth to shout, his gullet seemed to go straight through the bottom of the map. "You killed Tyrone! You've given me nightmares! You've ruined my life!"

  The crushing fist pulled them between the towering eyes that flicked and moved in sockets made of wet dirt. The hand squeezed. Vailret felt his bones about to crack. Black spots swirled in front of his eyes,
and he could not breathe or even gasp.

  "The Game is over!" David shouted. "And you have lost!"

  ――――

  Chapter 25

  Backfire

  "Desperate measures ― how the Outsiders enjoy them."

  ― the Sentinel Oldahn, before destroying a Slac citadel, and himself, to rescue Doril

  The old Sorcerers battled with no finesse, no imagination, simply brutal persistence. But they attacked, and kept attacking, even after they received deadly injuries.

  Siryyk's monster fighters fell by the score; many split up and fled back toward the mountain terrain. The special Slac troops tried a different tactic, with five of them converging on a single Sorcerer, hacking the undead body to pieces, then moving to the next opponent. The snow had been churned into mud and blood.

  The monsters howled and snarled and clanged their weapons as they battled; but the old Sorcerers spoke no word, gave no cry of triumph or pain or anger. They merely fought in silence, with a deliberate and ponderous ferocity.

  Siryyk stood by the carcass of the dragon and felt agony in his body. His scorpion tail remained drained of power. He felt cracked bones in his chest and hot blood in his mouth from Arken's attack; the wounds from Rognoth scored across his hide. He had never come so close to defeat before.

  When he saw that the fighters marching out of the ice fortress were yet another wild card Delrael's army played on him, he felt his fury rise to its highest pitch.

  With a sudden snap in his mind, he also sensed a greater freedom of his thoughts, as if the Outsider David had diverted his attentions elsewhere. Siryyk knew this would be his chance to make a final gambit.

  "I want those Stones now!" he snarled to himself, and then bellowed in a voice that crackled over the battlefield. "Korux!"

  General Korux rode away from the fighting in the steam-engine car. Bound in the back, Professor Verne lay struggling. Korux enjoyed taunting the prisoner and trying to frighten him, but Siryyk had no more patience for that.