Gamearth Trilogy Omnibus

by Kevin J. Anderson

  —The Book of Rules

  Vailret felt uneasy watching the dark-haired Sorcerer, wondering how much Enrod remembered. What if Scartaris had damaged his mind so much that he would always be a threat?

  With the curious army around him, Enrod stood by the bank of the Barrier River, digging his fingernails into the bark of a tree. He sniffed, then turned his head to one of the still-smoldering fires along the bank. He smiled, then nodded to the gray ash-clumps of other dead fires.

  “I can still make fire.” He bent down and smeared his hands in the cold remnants of one fire, pawing about for an ember. He held up a blackened lump of wood, but it held no spark. He dropped it with a disappointed sigh.

  By the bank, Vailret looked at where Enrod’s crude raft had washed up against dangling roots. Vailret remembered riding on it with Delrael and Bryl, surrounded by mist. Enrod had poled on, not seeing, only continuing his endless journey as decreed by the Deathspirits. When Vailret tried to snap him out of his trance, Enrod had moved with lightning speed, sending Vailret sprawling against the wet logs. The Sentinel had never spoken a word.

  Now Enrod splashed his ash-coated hands in the rushing water, confused by all the characters watching him.

  “How long have you been. . .awake again, Enrod?” Vailret asked. Despite his misgivings, Enrod of Tairé would be a great ally if he fought with them against the enemy horde. Delrael stood watching, as if he had not yet made up his mind about the Sentinel.

  Enrod continued to stare at his broken raft hung up on the black hex-line. Mud and silt had clogged up under one corner. A broken blade of grass drifted by, bobbing on a ripple, and then continued out of sight downstream.

  “Days. Not sure.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth. Some of the wet ashes stained his lips.

  “Like a dream. The Deathspirits. . .held me. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t move. Back and forth across the river.” He stared out at the hexagon-wide current. “Until now. Scartaris is dead, Deathspirits gone. I’m left here on this side. Where do I go?”

  He looked at them, turning his head so he might see all the characters there. But his eyes remained unfocused. “Something happened in my city. Scartaris.” He closed his eyes and pushed a hand against the side of his head. “Made me think things. Do things. It still echoes in my head!” His expression snapped into clarity and the words came out with sudden focus. “I always wanted to rebuild Tairé—that was my goal, but I could only think of burning.”

  He fixed his stare on Delrael, but it seemed to carry no antagonism. “Because you created this river.”

  “We destroyed Scartaris,” Delrael said. “You shouldn’t want to hurt us.”

  “Not. . .anymore,” Enrod said.

  Vailret bent forward. “The Earthspirits came to fight Scartaris. So did the Deathspirits. They vanished from Gamearth again, gone dormant to rest. Maybe they forgot about you, loosened your curse.”

  “Forgot about me.” Enrod made a thin smile. “But I can still make fire.” He kicked at the ashes in a circle by his feet.

  “The Deathspirits could have gone off to their other realms, to play Games of their own creation,” Tareah said. “That’s why they made the Transition in the first place.”

  “I don’t know. But they’re gone.” Delrael sounded impatient with the discussion. “It’s a good thing you didn’t stop trying to fight against them.” He hesitated. “Are you all right?”

  “Never stop trying. Never.” Enrod turned his gaze back to the washed-up raft. “This is no longer part of me. Gone.”

  He planted his foot on a corner of the raft and, bracing himself against the tree, he shoved the log. The raft lurched out into the current, leaving a cloud of mud in the water. The raft swerved one way and then curled around the other as it crawled into the current.

  “Why I stayed in Tairé for so many turns. In the desolation.” Enrod stared away from the river, back to the east. “Never stop trying.”

  Jathen came up beside Enrod. His heavy eyebrows and dark hair hung about him. His eyes glinted bright against the nightmares behind them. “Enrod, you and I are the last survivors of Tairé. When Scartaris sent you away, he made the rest of us Tairans do his work. We had to create weapons and shields for him!”

  “Weapons—from Tairé?” Enrod sounded astonished.

  “We supplied his horde of monsters. We sweated and worked—” Jathen swallowed and turned his face away. “We gave ourselves. Hundreds of us were skinned for leather, butchered and dried for meat to feed his army—” Jathen looked as if he were about to gag, then he whirled back. All the nightmares had resurfaced.

  “That’s the worst part, isn’t it, Enrod?” He stood up straight with his anger. “Yes, we’re free of the control. We can do what we want now. But we’re not free of the memories. Scartaris made us do what he wanted. But he didn’t hold our minds tightly enough to make us unaware of our actions. And now that I can remember what we were doing, it’s burning me up inside. Because if I can remember so clearly, why couldn’t I refuse?”

  “It’s not your fault, Jathen,” Delrael said.

  But the Tairan turned to him and snapped. “It isn’t? I worked in the tannery. Didn’t I know what I was doing? Was Scartaris so powerful that he could direct every finger that moved? Every step I took? Every. . .cut with the knife? I can see it all in front of me. I spent days there, skinning people, characters that I had known and grown up with, fought with and worked with. But none of that stopped me. Maybe if I’d tried harder I could have resisted. But I didn’t. I took the knife. They stood before me—their eyes were pupilless, focused ahead, unseeing.

  “But if I can remember what I was doing, surely they knew what was about to happen to them! Scartaris wouldn’t let them do anything more than stand there and wait as I drove a knife into their throats. At the last minute, did he release them, let them feel their own dying? I wouldn’t doubt it. Why should he bother to waste energy controlling them as they bled out on the floor of the tannery? While I stood waiting for them to stop jerking and writhing so I could skin them more easily and not waste a bit of their leather.”

  Enrod interrupted him and spoke in a quiet but piercing voice. Jathen’s words seemed to intensify Enrod, forcing back the maze of shadows in his mind. “If you’re responsible for all that, then I must be responsible for everything that I did.” He paused. “And that’s not a burden I can bear right now. Look ahead, not back.”

  “And forget about Tairé?” Jathen asked. His expression looked dumbfounded that his hero, the great Sentinel Enrod, would suggest such a thing.

  “No, never forget,” Enrod said. He looked behind him to the clustered trees and the quest-path that wound eastward away from the river. “Go back there.”

  Jathen held his breath in anticipation. Vailret could feel the tension in the air. Enrod brought his attention back to Delrael. “I will follow your army. Fight for Tairé.”

  Delrael’s voice was gruff. Vailret could see that his cousin wasn’t sure how much to say about their plans. “That’s where we’re going.”

  Enrod drew himself up, didn’t quite smile, but tugged a lock of black hair away from his face. Vailret noticed for the first time a thin streaking of white hairs in his beard. “I still have many powers. Spells.” Enrod looked down at his own hands, his tattered robe, as if embarrassed at the level to which he had sunk. “I lost the Fire Stone.”

  Delrael appeared about to say something, but Bryl suddenly broke in. Vailret realized that Bryl had covered up his own two Stones as soon as they saw Enrod again. Since Scartaris had used the eight-sided Fire Stone as a conduit to corrupt Enrod, Vailret silently agreed with Bryl’s decision.

  “The Fire Stone is—safe,” Bryl said.

  #

  The following morning, Vailret and Bryl prepared to go down their own quest-path as the remainder of the army broke camp.

  “Time to go,” Vailret said, clapping Bryl’s shoulder. He had not been looking forward to this moment, but they had no time to wast
e. “The Earth Stone is waiting for us.”

  “I’ll be sad to see you leave,” Tareah said, smiling at him. Her words made Vailret’s skin tingle with delight. He shuffled his feet.

  His mother Siya gave him a brief hug, hesitated, then gave him a much larger one, to his embarrassment. Siya turned with tears in her eyes and snapped at the characters around them. “What are you looking at!”

  Vailret felt uncomfortable with the entire ritual. He did not look forward to leaving the protection of the large army. As he stood there, wishing he could just be on his way, he had to wait as Delrael and Jathen bid them luck on their quest, as did other fighters he had come to know during training. It seemed to take forever.

  “With all the luck we’re being offered, we shouldn’t have any troubles at all,” Bryl muttered to him.

  “No,” Vailret said, “none at all.”

  Interlude: Outside

  The sheen in Melanie’s eyes made David want to slap her face to shake her out of it. But she would be completely beyond reason; Gamearth held her mind too firmly. David could only hope the others were not as weak—or everything was already lost.

  “It’s all or nothing tonight, David.” Melanie’s voice was like the growl of a small dog that wanted to sound threatening. It didn’t seem like her own voice anymore, and it probably wasn’t.

  She had won the dice roll when David contested her use of the character Enrod. Enrod had been David’s own character, raised in Tairé, which was his city. He had used Scartaris to send Enrod to attack the Stronghold, to weaken Melanie and stop her desperate schemes to keep the Game going.

  But Melanie claimed that since David had abandoned Enrod, the character was up for grabs. So she took him. She beat David by one point in the dice roll.

  Something about the way the dice fell made David more concerned. If the powers of the Game could reach out and manipulate them, if it could stop the phone from working, make his car engine refuse to start. . .couldn’t it also alter dice rolls? Couldn’t Gamearth play itself if it wanted, and make sure it won?

  But David could not accept that. The very foundation of Gamearth was built on the Rules. The Rules could not be tossed aside so easily. If Gamearth was willing to break those Rules, then the map would go about destroying itself without any help from him.

  Tyrone squinted at the map, pressing his face close to the painted hexagons. “I thought we might be able to see it. The ice bridge, you know? Like we could see the Barrier River when we created it.”

  David fought back his resentment. Tyrone was so focused on how much fun he had with the growing Game, that he couldn’t conceive of any danger.

  “It would have melted already, Tyrone. You should have looked before the round ended,” Scott said. Nothing else, no censure about “being ridiculous.” David had won an important victory with Scott, who always insisted on a rational explanation. At least Scott now realized the seriousness of the Game and how it was affecting all their lives.

  The flames continued to crackle in the fireplace. The room got warm enough that David pulled off his sweater. Outside the house, as the dusk grew into night, he could still hear the storm.

  “Are you going to bring out any other old characters, Mel?” Tyrone asked.

  David wanted to shake Tyrone and shout at him to face the reality of their situation. But Tyrone just didn’t understand.

  Melanie glanced at Tyrone, considering, then her eyes lit up. “Any character we’ve introduced before is fair game. David’s not going to pull any punches.” She refused to look at him. “So I’m going to use everything I can think of. David captured Jules Verne and the Sitnaltan weapon. We have to find weapons of our own.”

  David resented how she automatically included Scott and Tyrone in her conflict with him—unless Melanie was speaking of her own characters when she said “we.” David couldn’t tell.

  “I—” Scott said, then paused. He took off his glasses; his eyes looked small without the thick lenses. He seemed vulnerable and uncertain of what he wanted to say.

  “I’ve been thinking about this mix-up with the Game and our world. There’s really no way we can deny it. Not after the Barrier River, and the explosion last week.”

  He nodded toward the blue hexagons on the map and the blasted parts around Scartaris’s battlefield. The force released from that struggle had damaged Tyrone’s kitchen table and burned David’s hands.

  “So if this is really going on—” Scott said the word ‘this’ as if it encompassed everything. “Then I have to worry about something else. The Sitnaltan Weapon that Verne and Frankenstein built, that I directed them to build. . .they made it from the ship that David and Tyrone created out of their imaginations. The power source they took couldn’t have been totally real. And yet it couldn’t have been totally imaginary either.”

  He stopped for a moment, as if waiting for the others to understand the implications.

  “If it’s part real and part imaginary, the Sitnaltan weapon may be a lot more devastating than we know.” He swallowed. David could see him struggling with the concept in his own mind. “What if it’s more than enough to destroy Gamearth? What if it can backlash outside the map? What if it’s enough to destroy us too?”

  Tyrone groaned comically. “This is boggling my mind!”

  David ignored him and felt a shiver up his spine. That fear had been tickling the back of his mind, but he had not faced it until now. He remembered times when he didn’t seem to have complete control over his own characters. If Siryyk the manticore wanted to detonate the weapon now that he had Verne captive, David wasn’t sure he could stop it.

  He let his voice fall to a whisper. “I’m beginning to wonder just who created who.”

  Melanie looked at him in a rare moment of rapport, but then the defiance returned to her eyes. “Or is it mutual now? Are we and the Game so intertwined that we can’t survive without each other?”

  7. Mayer’s Research Expedition

  “Once we have finished gathering data, we are by no means finished with our research. In fact, the work has only begun, because then we must discover how to apply that information for our own benefit.”

  —Dirac, Charter of the Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers

  Mayer felt sore from riding the bicycle. She wobbled along the path, unsteady on the hard tires but impressed by the distance she had already covered. She still had several hexagons to go before she reached the Outsiders’ ship.

  Only a few hours after leaving Sitnalta, Mayer’s legs already ached from the effort of pedaling and steering over the bumpy terrain. Her dark hair streamed with sweat in the sunshine. She had spent too many hours in her tower workroom, pacing back and forth, thinking, scrawling designs in chalk on the dark wall—and not enough time exercising her body.

  With determination, Mayer pushed her legs down, applied force to the pedals, which turned the gear, pulling the chain and rotating the wheels, and carried her forward. Simple exhaustion wasn’t going to stop her.

  The black bicycle had been welded together from scrap piping, one of several prototypes developed by her father Dirac in his younger days; but the invention never caught on in Sitnalta. Probably, Mayer now thought, because the thing had never been designed with the comfort of its rider in mind. The seat was a flat metal triangle with rounded corners and two rigid springs that made each bump feel like a blow to her buttocks. The minimal padding did little to ease the ride.

  But it would take a team of engineers to get a steam-engine car up the winding paths Mayer knew she would be traveling. The initial Sitnaltan research team to the Outsiders’ ship had needed strong characters to hoist and lift their vehicles around sharp corners in the mountain terrain. Mayer could never do that by herself, and so she was left to her own abilities. She could travel faster with the bicycle than by walking.

  She rolled across a hex-line from flat grassland into abrupt mountain terrain. Mayer began to puff as the quest-path took a steep upward turn. After only a short while of
this, she stopped and dismounted from the bicycle, letting it fall to the dry grass and rocky earth.

  Mayer patted her thighs, stamped her feet, and flexed her hands to keep the blood circulating. She blinked and turned to look behind her, across two flat hexagons of grassland sprawling toward the intricate city of Sitnalta.

  A bird flew up from the grass, and Mayer squinted her eyes, studying the shape of its wings, the color of its markings. She tried to recall the proper genus and species name, though biology had never been her strongest talent. Professor Frankenstein would have known instantly.

  Mayer’s face shrank into a sour expression at the thought of the dark-eyed professor. He had disappointed her and angered her at the same time. After the destruction of the manufactories by the cruel force that seeped up through the Sitnaltan streets, Frankenstein had vowed to find a way of combating the invisible enemy.

  Straight-backed and on fire with determination, Mayer went to the professors’ workshop. Here Frankenstein and Verne had created so many inventions that even the Council of Patent Givers could not keep up with them all. She burst through the door without knocking and stood watching the dark inventor.

  He continued pacing around the cluttered room without even looking up at her. Mayer saw a thousand different inventions, some disassembled to be repaired, some half-constructed and then abandoned, not because they would not work but because the professors had grown more interested in something else.

  Frankenstein had knocked half-finished gadgets to the floor, ignoring any damage he might do to them. He simply needed more table space. Diagrams of human anatomy and large drawings of muscles and joints were pinned up on the walls and lying on the table in stacks. Scattered dissection reports of nervous systems poked out from other piles beside scrawled treatises on how different parts of the body worked.

  Professor Frankenstein had always been fascinated with living things and how they worked. He had spent much of his early solo effort in creating mechanical automatons, imitations of living things. Metal fish swam in the fountain pools, moving mechanical arms assembled items in the hazardous areas of the manufactories, claws picked up castings too hot to handle.