One of Mostem’s daughters opened the door at Tareah’s knock. The three daughters each looked the same; Tareah could tell them apart only by the varying lengths of their dusty-brown hair. All three were squat, with turned-up noses and narrow, dull eyes. Kind enough, the type who would be described in their later years as “sturdy women.” The girl blinked, as if trying to remember what she was supposed to say when guests came to the door.
“I need to see Vailret,” Tareah said. “Is he working in here?”
Mostem’s daughter opened the door wider. Tareah went in, paying her no further attention. The smells of fresh bread and yeast filled the main room, along with warmth from the wall on the other side of which Mostem housed his big ovens.
Vailret looked up at her and grinned, self-consciously brushing back his straw-colored hair. He had a thin nose and bright eyes that squinted too often. “Hello, Tareah!”
“Welcome, Tareah,” Siya said from her seat against the wall. “While you’re talking to my son, I’d appreciate a little help here.” She motioned at a mound of weapons and armor in need of repair beside her.
After watching the Stronghold destroyed before her own eyes, Siya had adopted their cause wholeheartedly. She could wield none of the larger weapons, but Siya adapted her other skills to help administer the growing army after Delrael’s call to arms. It was Siya who kept track of the numbers of trainees and where they came from. Siya managed the food distribution, found lodging for all of them—she kept the practical matters running smoothly.
She spent the rest of her spare time repairing and cleaning the old weapons they had kept at the Stronghold or the relics brought in by trainees. Patched and restitched leather armor lay cleaned and smelling of sweet oil in a separate pile. She polished rust off of blades, sharpening and oiling them. Now, she took a fine metal awl and chipped out hardened dirt and mud from the mechanism of a crossbow.
“Plenty here to do,” she said, indicating the heap again.
“Mother!” Vailret turned to her, scowling. “Tareah’s been using all six of her spells every day to replenish our supplies. That should be enough.” He turned to look at Tareah.
“Well, I have been doing that.” She smiled at him, which seemed to set Vailret all aglow. “But I can still do something while I watch what you’re doing.”
Without looking, Siya picked up an ornate battle-ax and untangled some fresh leather thongs from a pile on the floor. “The handle here needs to be rewrapped. The old lacings got blood on them and started to rot.”
Tareah used a knife blade to scrape the dark old leather from the ax handle and began twisting new thongs along the wood.
Vailret leaned over his table where he had spread out the huge map of Gamearth. He seemed to be showing off for her. Other characters had constructed the big master map over generations of exploring the world and adventuring. It had once been mounted on the Stronghold wall, but the collapse of the main building damaged it. Vailret used some of his own notes and talked to several old characters to reconstruct the details.
The flickering candles around the table made Tareah nervous that they would start the map on fire; a few specks of wax had spattered on the map itself. Siya always insisted that Vailret maintain enough light for his close work, especially with his weak eyesight.
Vailret squinted at two hexagons, trying to brush away smudges on a hex of forested-hill terrain. “After I get all the pieces together, I’m going to make several copies of the map for characters to have when we finally go on the march,” he said. “We need to know where we’re going. That’ll save us lots of time.”
Vailret flashed his gaze at her, as if sharing a secret. “Look here. With all the new characters coming in, we’re learning about dozens of new villages. Either they’re new settlements, or somehow they went undiscovered during all our years of questing!”
Siya snorted at him without looking up from her work. “Characters are settling down, Vailret. Lots of them stopped questing by the time your father was killed. All those characters had to live somewhere. What did you expect?”
Vailret ignored her. “And something else strange is happening, very strange. I’ve only just figured it out. Our couriers were told to move as fast as they could, to explore, to find all the villages and pass along the warning about Scartaris’s army. Most of the couriers traveled their allotted number of hexagons and then stopped, out of habit. But some of them found that there’s no restriction anymore! They can go farther. No matter what the Book of Rules says.”
Tareah stopped her work with the ax handle and looked up at him. She felt a sudden rush of fear.
Vailret dropped his voice to a whisper. “With the Outsiders disrupting the Game, with the Earthspirits and Deathspirits coming back and Scartaris nearly destroying the map, and the great battle, and . . . and with the piece of reality that Journeyman carried—something is going very wrong with Gamearth. Characters are breaking the Rules! For now it’s just travel restrictions that we know about, but maybe you can use more than your number of spells each day.” He raised his eyebrows. “Who knows what else can happen?”
Tareah blinked at him in shock. “That can’t be! The Rules are what hold Gamearth together. Without the Rules, we. . .it would be chaos!”
“Maybe that’s what we’re in for, whether we win or lose.”
Tareah tied off the leather thongs and set the ax on top of the mound of repaired weapons. She looked up to take something else from Siya, but the old woman had packed up her tools and stood up herself. “Come on, Vailret. Time to go,” Siya said. “It’s dark outside, and they’ll be doing the quest-tellings again. You know how much you enjoy those.”
Siya gave him what appeared to be a patronizing look, but Tareah knew that Siya enjoyed the quest-tellings as much as the rest of the villagers, especially now that she had become more interested in the battles. She always liked to hear legends about her husband Cayon and his quests with Drodanis.
Outside in the center of the village, the other characters had gathered around a bonfire made from the split trunks of some of the large trees; all of the smaller branches had already been used for making spears and arrows.
To start things off, one of the women characters from a mining village began telling how in her work underground she had broken into a network of catacombs that appeared ancient and well-traveled. Marveling at her discovery, she armed herself, took supplies, and set off to explore the tunnels, where many of the early quests of the Game must have taken place. She was gone a full day, mapping her progress and moving warily, eyes open for any sort of trap or attack. In the end, she found only a few scattered gems and dusty coins, and one broken skeleton of a misshapen monster. The dungeon was dead and empty, and she had not bothered to return again, though some of the children of her village occasionally played there.
Accompanied by five of his students, Delrael finally came striding into the village, finished with the last details of the day’s training exercises. Tareah saw him, encased in a set of armor, well-muscled, confident in his abilities. He smiled at Tareah, Vailret, and Siya sitting together near the fire.
They shared food and sipped steaming cider from wooden mugs. Delrael looked very tired, but charged with a new kind of energy. After some coaxing from the others, he began telling of his battle with the Cailee, the shadow-thing that was the deadly alter-ego of their companion Mindar from Tairé. As he spoke of how they had locked themselves in an underground storeroom, Tareah could picture them all waiting in darkness as the Cailee prowled just on the other side of the door, scratching at the wood with its long silver claws. Delrael told how the Cailee had attacked them out in the desert the following night, as they sat around their campfire, how it slaughtered Mindar’s horse and thrown its head into the fire—
A commotion among the gathered characters made Delrael pause in his story. Vailret squinted into the night. Tareah turned to see another figure approaching out of the twilight, a man dressed in dark and tattered clothes. He stumbled
forward, seeming to emerge from the dark surrounding forests.
He came forward one step at a time, swaying, concentrating on his balance. Several of the trainees leaped up to steady the man, bringing him toward the firelight. His face was scratched and smeared with mud and grime. He looked gaunt and starving, with sunken eyes. Though they brought him close to the fire, the stranger continued to shiver violently.
“Well, get him some water or something!” Delrael shouted. Before he had finished his command, someone thrust a dripping ladle into his hand. Delrael poured it on the haggard man’s mouth, not caring that most of it spilled down the stranger’s chin.
The man gasped and turned to stare at all of them, as if suddenly realizing where he was. He seemed to melt. He looked dark of skin, with tangled black hair and strong calloused hands.
“Tell us your name,” Vailret said, leaning close. “Where did you come from?”
The man’s eyes flashed with alarm and he gawked at the fire as if it would reach out and consume him. “From Tairé.” He drew in a long, sucking breath, then slumped beside the fire.
3. Four Stones
“Yes, if all the Sorcerers depart from Gamearth, we leave behind human fighters to defend it—but we also leave many enemies. We must give humans a greater advantage, a means to fight! We have much magic at our disposal. What are we going to do with it?”
—Arken, proposing that the old Sorcerer Council
create the four Stones
Delrael stood up in the firelight and spread his arms as other characters pushed forward, chattering with each other. The stranger flinched at their sudden reaction. “Stand back!” Delrael shouted to overcome their noise. “Give the man room to breathe!”
The others backed off as the stranger sat slumped and cross-legged in the dirt, shivering despite the fire’s warmth. His drab clothes, dark hair and skin reminded Delrael of Tairé, the city where Scartaris had stolen the minds of all its inhabitants. Tairé was the home of Mindar, the one woman somehow immune to Scartaris’s control; she alone had attacked Scartaris’s installations while the other Tairans unknowingly worked at creating weapons.
But this man had escaped from Tairé. After the destruction of Scartaris, he had somehow made his way here.
Before Delrael could say anything else, Siya squatted down with a mug of steaming cider in her hands. She looked with disdain at the unmoving spectators. “Have him drink this.”
The Tairan man took the mug and held it in both hands, but sat staring down at its surface. The trembling in his body caused tiny ripples to flow across the top, disturbing his reflection. He finally took a sip.
They all sat in silence. Delrael realized they were waiting for him to ask the questions, to find out what had brought the man here.
“The man needs rest,” Delrael said to the other characters. “He’s had a long and terrible journey. We’ll find a place for him to stay. He can talk to us tomorrow.”
“No!” the man said, coughing. He scowled at the cider, then took another drink. “I came this far. I can tell my story. You need to know what’s happened.”
Delrael dropped his voice and tried to sound gentle. “All right then, tell us your name.”
The Tairan blinked, as if unable to understand the relevance of the question. He held one hand out to the fire and visibly began to let exhaustion take hold.
“I am Jathen. You—” And then a flash shot across the stranger’s face. He turned so quickly that some of his cider sloshed out of the mug. “Delrael!” he said in an inhuman whisper that sent shudders down Delrael’s spine.
Delrael remembered all of the Tairans, massing toward him under the direction of Scartaris, ready to tear him and his companions apart with their mob frenzy. In a unison hissing voice they had all screamed his name, Delrael!
Jathen must have been among them.
The Tairan man’s expression fell. “We didn’t mean to do that. None of us could help it. Now I can’t help remembering.”
“It’s all right,” Delrael said. “We know what Scartaris did to you. What happened to your city beyond what we’ve already seen?”
Jathen glanced up with lost eyes. “As if that wasn’t terrible enough.” He shook his head.
“It happened just before dawn a few weeks ago. Scartaris was like a terrible nightmare, and we sleepwalked through it all. But then, all of a sudden, Scartaris vanished from our minds. He was gone, destroyed somehow. We in Tairé were free to face the horror of what we had done, what we had nearly helped him accomplish.
“We were stunned, but we managed to count our losses, learn exactly who had been killed—” He paused, stumbling over his words, and forced himself to continue. “We learned who we had killed.
“Then, we searched for Enrod, who had helped us build Tairé and resurrect it from the desolation. Enrod had been our strength, our guiding force, a true visionary with the best intentions for all human characters. But Enrod had left us. We couldn’t understand what happened.”
Jathen stared around at the faces, as if searching for some explanation. Vailret cleared his throat and turned his gaze away as he answered. “Scartaris twisted Enrod’s mind as well. The Deathspirits trapped him on the Barrier River and sentenced him to take his raft back and forth for the rest of the Game.”
Jathen hung his head. “Enrod deserved better than that after all the good he did.”
Delrael sighed. “The Deathspirits did not seem willing to negotiate.” The bonfire continued to crackle and slump as some of the burning logs collapsed into ashes.
Jathen remained silent, digesting the news about Enrod. Finally, he picked up his story. “We Tairans met with each other. We walked the streets. We looked at our city and saw all the frescoes, the statues, everything we had built. We saw the dried fountains, the gutters, the brittle plants. We went outside the walls and saw our dead crops.
“At first the dead grass and trees in the hills made us despair. All the terrain we had recovered was lost again. But as we continued to look at our city, it became clear to us how much we had already accomplished. We let our pride return. We had built this with our own hands, with our own sweat. We had snatched that land from the worst blight ever seen on the map.
“The Stranger Unlooked-For came and rescued us from destruction once. Then Scartaris grew, and then someone else, another Stranger, destroyed him.”
“Journeyman,” Vailret muttered.
“Now we had a third chance, and we couldn’t just ignore it. We felt at a loss—and yet, it made our commitment stronger. We in Tairé were stronger than the Outside forces of the Game. We would prove ourselves self-sufficient, independent of the whims of the Players. We could defend against anything. We vowed to start work immediately, to clean up the rubble, to restart the forces. To come back better than ever!”
Jathen closed his eyes and continued speaking. “We set to work with such enthusiasm as we had never felt before. We would do it this time. Tairans have always been proud of our optimism in the face of hardship. For all the good it did us.”
Jathen opened his eyes and stared into the firelight, but he seemed to be seeing something else entirely. “And then the monster army came, led by that manticore. They came without warning, and without mercy. And they wiped us out!”
Some of the trainees mumbled to each other. Jathen did not pause to let the noise die down.
“Because of the grassy-hill terrain to the east of the city, we couldn’t see the army until it was only a hexagon away. They came in the darkness. We Tairans had been working all day and all night, taking shifts. But we knew something was wrong at dawn, when a team of workers out repairing an irrigation system failed to return on time.
“As the sun rose and the morning grew brighter, some characters working on the top of our wall spotted the manticore’s army. We sent out a team of emissaries, not knowing what this was. They didn’t return.
“The monster horde marched forward. For the next hour or so, we grew afraid. We had no protection
. We had no weapons in Tairé. Scartaris had already taken everything we made, stripped us of all our resources. Even our great wall had been breached.”
Jathen looked at Delrael, then at Vailret. Delrael remembered how the golem Journeyman had used his immense strength to knock down a portion of the wall so they could escape the attack of the Tairan people.
“We built barricades, we made clubs, we. . .improvised weapons. It was all we could do.” He closed his eyes and made a sobbing, laughing sound.
“It was so useless. Oh, we did manage to kill some of the first creatures as they charged in, using their own battering rams to knock down other parts of the wall. They swarmed into the city—there were so many of them. And not very many of us.
“We managed to defend ourselves for a few minutes. And then the monsters broke through, and kept coming. And kept coming! We couldn’t stand against them.
“We ran for our lives, all of us, not just me. Many Tairans barricaded themselves in buildings, fled to hiding places within the city. But I knew that would be useless. The manticore’s army searched from building to building, and they slaughtered any human characters they found. They weren’t quick about the killing either. Those characters who barricaded themselves lasted only a few hours. The monsters had all the advantage in this game.
“A few dozen of us fled the city out into the surrounding terrain. We ran, and there was no shelter for several hexes. Just grassland or flat desolation, no place to hide.
“The monsters came fast. Most of us died out there, in the desolation. Not a good place to die. Several of us made it to the mountain terrain, where we hid among the rocks. We split up to make smaller targets. We kept running westward. I knew you were here, along with other villages of human characters. Some of us went south.
“Siryyk kept sending scouts to hunt us down—I know several of the others were executed that way. I might be the only one who survived. But I knew it was no use to stay and die with the others. It wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?” He looked around. “Would it? And I made it here to warn you, because the manticore’s army won’t stop in Tairé for long. They’ll regain some of their supplies, maybe make a few more weapons.”
Gamearth Trilogy Omnibus Page 60