He stumbled backward. His ears burned, and he stared at the turmoil of battle below him. All they had done, the characters who had died. . .Sadic, Tallin, the entire city of Tairé—”What do you mean?”
“Scartaris is too powerful. That is one of the other reasons we had you carry us across the map. Physical travel is. . .difficult for us, now that we are only marginally connected with the map of Gamearth. We can move you, like a player moving a piece on a gameboard. But the hex-lines are great stumbling blocks for us. We are outside the Rules, and yet trapped by them.”
The silver belt felt cold and tingling at his waist. Delrael didn’t want to touch it. The Spirits continued.
“But still, according to those same Rules, when an evil adversary threatens, good characters must do their best to fight. Regardless of their chances. Therefore, we will fight. Though Scartaris is much more powerful, nothing is absolute on Gamearth. We must hold on to that chance.”
“You mean, you hope that Mindar’s Stranger Unlooked-For shows up?” Delrael tried to keep the scorn out of his voice.
“We know nothing of that. We must fight and do our best—as you must, Delrael. And your sworn quest is to take us to Scartaris. Now finish your quest!”
His heart felt like a lead brick inside him, but he plodded toward the grotto. If the Earthspirits couldn’t destroy Scartaris, maybe they could at least weaken him, buy time for the magic of Gamearth to find another way on its own.
Scartaris had few defenses this far behind the ranks, probably to show his overconfidence. Several minor demons wandered among the rocks where they had fled. They fought without enthusiasm, and Delrael defeated them or chased them away. He still felt new energy from the Earthspirits, along with a growing anger at the futility of it all. He stalked toward the opening and the many-colored lights inside.
Rocks crunched under his boots as he climbed up the slope. Jagged boulders stood beside the opening that led deep into the mountain. He could not see the source of the lights, but weird shadows played on the wall and spilled out onto the quest-path.
Weariness crept up on him as he approached the end of the journey. He needed only to get to Scartaris, throw down the silver belt.
Panting, he strode up to the opening and he saw a figure inside, backlit against the grotto. She stood staring, looking devastated. The S-scar on her forehead glowed with its own bloody light. She slumped against one of the tall rocks beside the opening.
“Mindar!” Delrael said. “You’re safe.”
He saw a flicker of happiness when she looked at him, but that too was swallowed by the gulf of despair behind her eyes. “Of course I survived. I had to. Scartaris won’t let me die.” Her misery seemed to be tearing her apart.
“What’s wrong? We’re almost there. We can destroy Scartaris!” The lie came out, but he had to say it for her.
She glared at him with a wasteland of expression. The rippled sword rested against her leg, stained with dark blood. Her entire body trembled. “I’m the only thing left to stop you, Delrael.”
He took a step back; his thoughts churned. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes averted. He couldn’t imagine she would do anything to harm him. “What are you talking about?”
Mindar hung her head. “I lied to you.”
A black shadow-form oozed out of the dark rocks beside the opening and stood silhouetted next to her. Its silver claws gleamed from the reflected light.
“I didn’t know until now, but it’s true,” Mindar said. “I am the Cailee!”
21. Threshold of Scartaris
“Do you enjoy these battles, these Wars? Are they fun? Look what they have cost you!”
—Stilvess Peacemaker
Delrael’s heart stumbled a beat, and his breath came in ragged gasps. He wanted to reach out for Mindar, to take her arm, but he felt stunned.
“Scartaris kept the truth from me. The Cailee is my shadow, a darker part of me than I knew I had,” Mindar said. A sigh hissed through her teeth .
“It splits from me each night to cause its harm. We cannot live without each other. And Scartaris won’t let us die. It was part of his Game. He made me hate the Cailee, despise it—but I was only hating myself! Scartaris thinks of it as fun!”
She bit back an outcry as something forced her to take a lurching step toward the Cailee. The shadow thing moved closer to her, blotting out the flickering light from the grotto. They touched each other, overlapping.
The darkness of the Cailee flooded over Mindar’s body like a blanket of tar. Long silver claws hung down from her fingers, wrapped around the hilt of her rippled sword. Shadows masked her face, but Delrael could see her features silhouetted—the high cheekbones, the angry mouth. Mindar’s eyes became misty yellow and pupilless. The red S-scar burned through.
Delrael stood transfixed. This was too much. The Cailee took one step, powerful and deadly, blocking the way. But it was Mindar, too. When the hybrid woman/shadow spoke, her voice had grown huskier.
“We know of your quest, Delrael. Scartaris is—” Mindar/Cailee tossed her head, as if fighting with herself. Something snapped inside, and she let out a strangled roar, lunging with her rippled sword.
Delrael gave a yelp of surprise and sprang back ward, exhausted but still tense with battle reflexes. Mindar/Cailee slashed at him, rippled sword in one hand and silver claws in the other. He tried to back away, unwilling to fight her, but she struck again. He stumbled on a loose rock and slid away from her blade.
“Mindar!” he said, but her eyes remained pupilless. The Cailee held her entirely now, though Delrael saw flickers of something behind her gaze.
He staggered back to his feet and swung his own sword, but it was only to deflect her. Mindar/Cailee defended herself, and Delrael ran around and pushed past into the uncertain light of Scartaris’s grotto.
Mindar/Cailee bounded after him. Delrael had to stop, panting. His arms and legs ached. He could barely move. She slashed out, and Delrael brought up his blade to block the blow. The force knocked his arm aside, clanging his sword against the rock wall of the cave.
He pleaded with the woman trapped within the Cailee. “Mindar, listen to me! Can’t you see Scartaris wants this?” He wheezed his words, but the angered Cailee drove at him with renewed force.
“Mindar—you’ve turned into the thing you hate the most! You’re a creature of Scartaris!”
Delrael fought against Mindar/Cailee’s growing fury. His arms felt like stone, heavy and unresponsive. He managed to fend off the blows that flashed at him, but his body trembled with exhaustion. He had used up all his adrenaline.
“Mindar, remember your daughter. Remember the tannery. Remember Taire!” His throat was raw.
Delrael gazed into the Cailee’s yellow eyes. Dark pupils flickered on the verge of appearing. Mindar/ Cailee hesitated, wincing her silhouetted features and struggling with herself. “We’re inseparable now,” she gasped. Then the Cailee howled and slashed at the air with a fistful of silver claws. Her pupils faded again.
She struck and slashed in a storm of blows with the rippled sword. Delrael’s arm seared with pain. He stumbled as he fought with the last of his strength. His sword sliced up and nicked Mindar/Cailee’s arm, drawing a strange mixture of shadow-smoke and bright blood.
The Cailee howled and surged back at him with such vehemence that Delrael had no hope of de fending himself. She knocked his arm aside, smashing his wrist against the rock wall. His own sword clattered to the floor.
Mindar/Cailee raised her blade to cleave Delrael’s head.
“Mindar . . . “ he whispered.
Her sword swung down, but Mindar’s pupils flickered back for an instant. In her downstroke, she twisted her wrist sideways and struck him on the head with the flat of the blade.
Bright light exploded behind Delrael’s eyes, then it all turned black. He slid to the floor.
Professor Verne’s steam-engine car clanked down the slope toward Scartaris’s mountain, skirting the
edge of t
he battlefield. The ratcheting noise was not noticeable over the shouts of fighting monsters and human soldiers.
He stoked the fires under the boiler as high as they would go. The car picked up steam and chugged along faster than a man could run. The hex-line separated him from the rocky terrain, but he also saw the clear path leading up to the grotto.
Verne swallowed and blinked his eyes. He checked to make sure his journal was carefully secured with him. He didn’t know what indignities he would have to bear on his long walk back to Sitnalta. If he survived at all.
He carried one tiny galvanic cell that powered a detector he had mounted next to the car’s steering levers. It was one of the instruments he and Frankenstein had used to detect Scartaris’s presence all the way from Sitnalta.
He switched the device on and saw the needle move, then fall dead, move, then fall dead. He was too far beyond the influence of Sitnaltan technology, regardless of how arbitrary he had proven the concept of the technological fringe to be. But even given the worst of situations, the Rules of Probability made the detector certain to work some of the time. The homing mechanism would need to function only at infrequent intervals to steady the course of the car along the straight path to Scartaris.
Verne knew his weapon was so powerful he needed only to get near the grotto.
For a moment he wondered in terror if the weapon itself might fail to work. But then he brushed that thought aside. The Sitnaltan weapon was powered by the force that had driven the Outsiders’ ship. It would work anywhere on Gamearth—it had to. The Outsiders set up their own exceptions to the Rules, and they would follow them.
But this weapon combined the power of the Outsiders with the resourcefulness of Gamearth. What if he and Frankenstein had forged a destructive power greater than either world had seen before?
As the car chugged along, Verne watched the ground pass under the rattling wheels. He set his mouth in a firm line, thrusting out his beard. This was close enough for him.
He turned to the weapon and found the timer knob as the car jostled over the terrain, steering itself. Verne twisted the timer knob to a red mark on the dial and released it.
A rapid ticking came out of the weapon as the spring-driven timer began its countdown to detonation.
Verne had heard of a prophesied hero from some of the other human settlements outside the fringe, some unknown savior who would come out of no where and rescue them from great peril. They called him the Unseen Stranger, or something like that. Not that Verne put much stock in prophesies, since they had no scientific basis. But after he unexpectedly used his weapon to destroy Scartaris, no doubt the storytellers would make him out to be their Stranger. He clucked his tongue in disapproval.
Suddenly, a gigantic bare-footed ogre bounded away from the battlefield toward the car, drooling down his chin. The ogre tripped twice and regained his feet to stumble after Verne. He limped from a deep wound on his ankle.
Verne had nothing with which to fight this ogre. He felt a flash of fear, but the ogre seemed more intent on the speeding car itself than on its driver. Gairoth hopped forward, clutched the side, and scrambled aboard, heaving himself over the low door. He grabbed Verne by the collar of his woolen coat.
“One moment, monsieur!” Verne stammered.
But Gairoth was not interested in him. “Haw!” he said, spraying spittle in Verne’s face. With an expression of dismissal, he tossed the Professor over the side.
Verne landed in a tumble, bruised and hurt. He stood up, brushed himself off, and scowled. He watched the steam-engine car move on, homing in toward Scartaris.
Gairoth sat in the seat and bounced with delight as the car sped automatically toward the mountain.
“I don’t think you wanted to do that,” Verne muttered.
In the front of the car, the Sitnaltan weapon continued to tick.
Mindar stared at Delrael’s unconscious form against the rocks. Weird lights flashed on and off in the background, bathing him in strange colors. A spot of blood blossomed on his forehead and trickled alongside his nose, into his eyes.
Mindar had forced herself to the front of her mind, but she had to grit her teeth and concentrate, not letting her thoughts lapse for a second. The Cailee gibbered in the back of her head, making her ears ring. Her anger surged, but she had to keep it directed away from the Cailee. She would gain nothing by that.
Scartaris. Scartaris was her enemy.
The Cailee was part of herself. She had to accept it, dominate it, turn it to her own advantage.
Mindar felt blackness slough away from her face and shoulders as she grew stronger. In one arm she held her sword, and curved silver claws stuck out of her other hand—but she could see her own skin appearing in patches through the inky blackness. She was growing stronger. She knew what she could do.
Part of her felt appalled at what she had done to Delrael, but she knew he would forgive her. Mindar would never be able to forgive herself, though, not unless she finished Delrael’s quest for him.
She knelt down, and with the clumsy claws on her hand she worked the silver belt free from around his waist. She stared at it in the light, letting it dangle in front of her. The silver felt cold and slippery, tingling with power.
The Earthspirits lived in the belt. She held them, vulnerable, in her own hand—but they could destroy Scartaris. They could wipe him from the map. She cast her rippled sword on the floor. It clanged on the rock and landed near Delrael’s blade.
“You won’t make me cause any more harm, Scartaris!” The belt glittered in the weird light. “This is all the weapon I need to destroy you.”
Heavy footfalls sounded outside the entrance to the grotto. She turned. Her black form was liquid and cast no shadow of its own.
She saw the blocky form of a huge Slac general. It dragged its feet on the rocks with scattering sounds, and the clank of a chain rattled in the silence. The monster let a needle-spiked ball dangle at its side.
“Scartaris has grown bored with you,” the Slac said in its husky, grating voice. The pupilless pits of its eyes were filled with emerald fire.
Mindar/Cailee coughed out a laugh and held the silver belt as she strode recklessly toward the Slac. She held the belt between her two hands. “I’m bored with him, too. Earthspirits, destroy this thing of Scartaris!”
She squeezed the belt with her shadow-stained hands and held it, waiting for some explosion of power that would whisk the Slac out of the Game entirely.
But instead the Slac lashed down with his heavy spiked ball and smashed one of Mindar’s wrists. She screamed in shock. The wrist bones snapped, and her fingers spread out as blood sprayed in the air. She backed away in agony. The silver belt fell to the floor.
The Cailee’s furious presence clamored in the back of her head and tried to surge into dominance again. She pushed it away. The shadow-stain dripped from her body.
The Slac general said, “Scartaris wants you dead. You’re no fun anymore.”
Wincing the pain away, blind to what she was doing, Mindar/Cailee laughed again. “I can’t die!”
She leaped at the reptilian creature, spreading the claws of her uninjured hand. In the back of her mind, she drove the Cailee further away with her determination and victory. The blackness faded from her arms, and she made a savage slash at the Slac’s throat.
But the long silver claws snapped off and dissolved as she struck. Her hand became her own again—human and weak.
“All characters can die,” the Slac said. He wrapped his spiked ball and chain around her throat, yanking it from one end to strangle her and driving the ball’s spikes into the back of her head. The Slac jerked again, and Mindar’s neck snapped before she felt any more pain.
The Slac let her body unravel from the chain and fall to the floor. Then the monster twirled the spiked ball in the air to clean droplets of blood from his weapon.
Delrael groaned on the floor and stirred.
The Slac general strode to him. The ball clanked at his
side. Breath hissed through needle-like teeth as the Slac leaned over Delrael.
“Well, excuuuuuuse me!” Journeyman said from the opening of the grotto.
The Slac general snapped his head up and turned, hissing.
The golem looked at Vailret beside him and grinned with flexible clay lips. “He likes it! Hey Mikey!” Journeyman swaggered in, and the Slac general faced him, dangling the spiked ball.
Vailret saw Delrael’s motionless form and Mindar lying dead. He stood behind and to the right of Journeyman, waiting and anxious. When he saw an opportunity, he slipped around and ran to Delrael.
“This here town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Journeyman said. The Slac’s green eyes blazed brighter.
Vailret cradled Delrael’s head and wiped blood away from his eyes. The fighter mumbled and moaned. The bump on his head looked serious, but far less severe than Vailret had feared.
He glared up at the Slac general facing Journey man. The golem did not appear frightened at all, but Delrael lay injured, Mindar murdered. Delrael’s silver belt lay beside her. Vailret did not know what had happened.
The Slac general stood tall and dark and filled with all the evil of Scartaris.
As he saw the Slac, Vailret remembered the training Drodanis had put him through back at the Strong hold, the role-playing game where Vailret was captured by Slac while his imaginary comrades were tortured and slain. An imaginary general like this one had ordered Vailret’s execution, but Vailret managed to kill the Slac general before other arrows struck him down. It had felt so real to him, the terror, the helplessness, the failure. But it was only a game within the Game; this Slac battle was happening now.
He stood up as anger filled his features. He held his short sword.
The Slac general twirled his spiked ball. Journey man waited for the monster to make the first move.
Instead, Vailret did.
In true Game spirit he should have bellowed out a cry of challenge, but Vailret moved silently as he leaped forward. He jammed his short sword all the way up to its hilt, through the back plates of the Slac, into its kidney, and up into its pulsing heart. The tip of the sword pushed out through the reptilian chest. The Slac general gurgled in surprise and sprayed black blood out of its mouth.
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