“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 stunne
d, but perplexed.
“Is there a speck of doubt in your minds? Is there even one whispered thought gnawing at you? It’ll take only a momentary flicker of disbelief—and then you’ll be gone!” He forced himself to laugh loudly.
Bryl held up the Water Stone, looking angry. “If I could see you, Spectres, I’d give you a taste of the power you say does not exist.”
Paenar, standing in silence, rapped his eye-staff on the ground. He gave a secretive smile and pointed the end of the staff off into one corner of the courtyard.
Bryl apparently knew what he meant and rolled the Water Stone in the dust. A bolt of lightning seared through the air to where the blind man had pointed. The bolt struck something, and a mammoth shriek echoed along the stone walls of the citadel. Paenar pointed again, and again. Bryl scrabbled to pick up the sapphire cube and rolled it three more times, missing the spell once but striking the Spectres twice, using his anger to pry more energy from the Stone.
The two Outsiders howled. Vailret shouted after them, “Can you feel that, Outsiders? Is that imaginary power? How can you be hurt by imaginary pain?”
He let his words sink in a moment. “I believe the Water Stone is real. I believe Gamearth is real. I believe I am real.” Vailret dropped his voice and spat out his words, one at a time. “And I do not believe in you!”
“This is not possible!” the dominant Spectre voice bellowed. Then soul-ripping wails filled the courtyard, and a burst of unbearable light, as something tore its way screaming through the air, whisked off to a place not imaginable. Only a brief howl of despair was left behind, quickly fading into the mountain wind.
Vailret found himself knocked backward to the lifeless dirt of the Slac training ground. Beads of sweat dried cool on his forehead. He blinked at spots of color in front of his dazzled eyes.
Delrael whooped. He got to his feet, jumping up and down as if he had forgotten about his kennok leg.
“Are they gone?” Bryl asked. “Are they destroyed, or just sent back to their own world?”
“I don’t know,” Vailret said, but his voice came out as a whisper. “Maybe I freed them from the Rules binding them here after so long. Or maybe they did disbelieve in their own existence enough to . . . to erase themselves. “
Delrael frowned and scratched his head. “Did you believe what you were saying to them? Is it all true?”
Vailret pursed his lips. “I . . . don’t think so.”
The sound of quiet sobbing came from beside them, and they looked to find Paenar squatting on the ground with the knees of his long legs jutting up in the air. He bowed his head into his hands, trying to hold onto his dignity, but spasms rippled through his hunched back.
Bryl saw the blind man’s eye-staff discarded on the ground. The blue glow in the end had died away, and the loose lenses, no longer working, lay scattered in the dry dirt.
Paenar looked up at them, unable to cry because his tear ducts had been blasted away. His blackened eye sockets stared as blind and as lifeless as the cold stone of the fortress around them.
Interlude: Outside
Melanie fluttered her eyelids, trying to chase away the bright spots behind her vision. The dice bounced around on the table by themselves, like popcorn, clattering against the map. The lights in the house dimmed. The dice came to rest, and everything else fell silent.
David climbed back to his feet from where he had fallen off the chair. His skin turned pale and clammy, like old cottage cheese. His eyes looked from one object to another around the room, but remained focused in the imaginary distance. He flexed his hand where an angry red welt like a burn had appeared.
Tyrone’s mouth was wide with astonishment, locked in a combined expression of delight and terror.
Scott held one of the transparent dice up to the light, staring at it. “Impossible.” He frowned, but glared at the dice, the map in challenge. “It’s just a stupid game!”
“Maybe we’ve all got overactive imaginations,” Tyrone said.
“It’s not real,” Scott repeated.
David shook his head and sat back down again. “That’s it. Enough for tonight. I can’t play any more.”
“No!” Scott slammed the dice back down on the table with a vehemence Melanie thought he did not intend. Scott looked at them all, blinking his eyes behind his glasses. “They’re heading into my section next. I’ve had about enough of this magical crap. Things are going to start making sense.”
He closed his eyes. “They have to start making sense.”
10. City of Sitnalta
“We have sent out explorers, we have brought our measuring devices, we have collected data. There can be no doubt: Beyond a certain boundary around our city, the Rules of Physics change. Science may not be the natural order for all of Gamearth. Some characters might believe in magic . . . and in certain cases it may even work for them.”
—Dirac, address to the Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers
Vailret found some warm, stagnant water in a cistern at the edge of the courtyard. He tore down a tattered Slac banner, soaked in the gritty cistern, and went to Paenar. He tried to soothe the blind man by dabbing water on his face.
Paenar made it clear that he did not want to be coddled. He stood up, brushing himself off to regain his dignity. The blind man stood for a moment without moving, then reached down with amazing accuracy to pick up his useless eye-staff. Paenar felt the empty end of the staff and stooped, feeling around in the dust from the loose lenses. He rubbed them together in the palm of his hand, making clicking noises like the song of an insect.
With a snarl on his face, Paenar turned and hurled the blind lenses across the courtyard, skittering them against the twisted metal girders of the Spectres’ dead ship.
“You fought back!” Paenar said. “You fought the Outsiders and won! All this time I never even tried to resist them. It wasn’t hopeless after all.”
Bryl crossed his thin arms and put on a defiant expression. “I’m not going to give up. Failure is the easy way out.” The enthusiasm made him look healthier, less old.
Vailret went over to the ruins of the Spectres’ ship. It lay in tumbled parts made of glass, porcelain, and shining metal. Thin wind howled around the girders, making them hum. Nothing seemed workable on the Outsider ship, nor was it obvious how the pieces fit back together.
He picked up Paenar’s scattered lenses from the eye staff and held them up to the light; one had been chipped, but not badly. Vailret tilted it one way and another—then at a certain angle, he stopped, amazed. Through the lens he could see a different world entirely, like a window to the Outside. He saw figures, four of them, three young men and a brown-haired girl, all dressed oddly. They seemed to be arguing with each other. Strange food and drinks were scattered around a smooth table with dice and maps.
The Outsiders?
Had he glimpsed them Playing? And survived? He blinked his eyes and felt a shiver burn through his veins. But before he could shout to the others, he tilted the lens again and lost the angle. Dismayed, he turned the glass in the sunlight, squinting and trying to find the window again—but he had lost it. Frowning, he placed the lenses in a leather pouch at his side.
“What will you do now?” Paenar finally asked.
Bryl put the Water Stone back in his pocket and tossed pebbles against the towering, moss-grown wall of the citadel. Delrael took out his sword and inspected it in the sunlight, then sheathed it with a click against his scabbard. He straightened the bow on his back, and slapped a hand against his leather armor. “We may as well go down with an adventure so grand that the Outsiders will wonder how they ever got bored with Gamearth after all!”
“I am awed by you all. You shame me with my own surrender,” Paenar said. It seemed difficult for him to talk. “May I accompany you at least as far as Sitnalta? Perhaps I can assist you in some way, to repay you for . . . freeing me. I’ll try not to make your journey slower.”
“We can’t very well leave you here.” Vailret looked at the
open expression of shame and helplessness on the blind man’s face.
“Before we go, let’s do a quick exploration of this place,” Delrael said. “Come on, Vailret—who knows, there may be other captives in some of the cells far below.”
Vailret stiffened, looking up at the blocky, threatening walls. “What about the Slac? I don’t want any more ‘little adventures’ to slow us down.”
“There aren’t any Slac left, so come on.” Delrael shrugged, then grinned at his cousin. “It just rubs me the wrong way to leave a place like this unexplored.”
Bryl stayed with Paenar out in the sunshine where he could rest, but Vailret remained close by his cousin as they entered the massive fortress. They hurried through the stifling corridors, taking turns poking their heads inside open rooms. The hinges groaned when Vailret and Delrael pulled open heavy doors. “Think we’ll find any food?” Delrael asked.
“Would you want to eat what a Slac eats?”
“I see your point.”
They went down a broad staircase leading underground. Vailret’s uneasiness grew. “Hello!” Delrael shouted. “Is anybody here?” His words pounced on the walls and rattled down the twisted corridors.
“Be quiet!” Vailret whispered. “Let’s go back—I don’t know if I can remember my way out anymore.”
“Of course you can. We’ll go just a little farther.” Vailret hung back and Delrael finally sighed in impatience. “What’s the matter with you?”
Vailret felt defensive, but kept his anger in check. “I’m a little nervous, that’s all.”
Delrael pursed his lips. “With all we’ve been through, Vailret, I know you’re not a coward—what’s so frightening about an old empty fortress?”
Vailret looked at him in surprise but saw only puzzlement. “I thought you would understand. Didn’t you do the role-playing training game at the Stronghold? In the weapons storehouse with your father?”
“Sure—I had to go rescue a jewel from a tribe of worm-men underground. Everybody’s adventure is different.”
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