Gameplay (25 page)

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.

“Stabbing in the back may not be fair,” Vailret said, “but since when have Slac ever fought fair?”

The monster bellowed as it weakened, trying to jab backward with its elbows. But Vailret let go of his sword and stepped away. With a bestial grunt, the Slac fell to its knees. Journeyman bashed a rock-hard fist into its forehead. “Bah, humbug!”

Vailret blinked in shock. The hot Slac blood burned his hands, and he tried to wipe it on his pants and tunic, leaving dark stains there.

Delrael groaned again. Journeyman glanced from him to Vailret, then squared his shoulders. The golem stared down the tunnel to the center of the mountain. “I must go on ahead now,” he said. “Take Delrael and get out of here.”

Vailret looked up. “What are you going to do?”

Journeyman’s lumpy clay brows twitched and knitted together. “I’m going to destroy Scartaris, as I was always meant to do. I’m glad I was created for this purpose. I’m glad I knew you. I will not be coming back.”

“What do you mean? Will it destroy you?”

Journeyman didn’t answer. Distressed, Vailret stood up. Delrael blinked and moved his head. He groaned.

“Wait—let Del take the Earthspirits. They’ll destroy Scartaris and you can stay here. You don’t need to sacrifice yourself.”

The golem squared his shoulders. “It is what I am. I was made for this task. I must sacrifice myself.”

“But it makes no sense!”

Journeyman stared with cavernous eyes. The clay eyelids blinked together, and he answered stiffly. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.”

Vailret pulled his short sword from the dead Slac general, but looked at it, not knowing what to do. He couldn’t fight Journeyman.

The golem sighed. “Don’t you know yet who I am?” He cocked his head. “My predecessor was Apprentice, many turns ago. I am Journeyman.” He let the words hang in the air. The lights from deep in the grotto flashed weird patterns on the ceiling.

“I am the Stranger Unlooked-For.”

Gairoth jammed his knees in the cramped seat of Professor Verne’s steam-engine car. The vehicle toiled along up the hill toward Scartaris. He had seen the bat-creature take Delroth toward the mountain. The car moved faster than he could run.

Gairoth let his spiked club dangle outside the vehicle, pinging against rocks that bounced up from the ground. He saw the great cavern on the mountain face and knew that Delroth would have gone there.

“Haw!” he said. His arms were tired. His legs were tired. His feet were sore. He had traveled across the map to get Delroth. He would bash Delroth’s head in for causing him so much trouble.

He shifted his knees, banging against the steering levers, and squirmed. The seat was uncomfortable, soft and human, and the space too confined for his bulky arms and legs.

The vehicle rolled up the slope, paused as if to gather its bearings, and then moved on its preset course.

Beside him, the Sitnaltan weapon continued to tick.

Gairoth bounced up and down, anxious to see any sign of Delroth. But then the steam-engine vehicle caught its wheels against the strewn boulders and stopped halfway up the side of the mountain on a blind switchback. The steam engine hissed and belched curls of gray smoke out its stack, but it could not move forward.

Gairoth fumed and tried to stand up in the cramped front of the car. He banged his knee. He roared in wordless rage and waved his club in the air. He couldn’t even see the cave; one of the curved rock spires blocked his view.

He hopped out and tugged at the wheel, trying to get the vehicle to move on and find Delroth. He hollered at the useless car. When the vehicle made no response, Gairoth lashed out and kicked it with one big, bare foot.

The Sitnaltan weapon jarred on its seat, tipping over against the side of the car. The timer mechanism smashed and jammed. The ticking fell silent only seconds before its detonation was to occur.

Gairoth grumbled at the immobile vehicle and strode up the hill on foot.

Journeyman marched down the low-ceilinged path, heading deep into the mountain where Scartaris controlled his armies. The golem’s soft clay feet slapped on the stone floor. The temperature grew hotter around him.

His quest and his reason for existence had almost reached its end. He knew he would succeed.

“Please,” Journeyman had told Vailret, “I have enjoyed knowing you. I don’t want to overcome you by force. Take Delrael and head for the hills! I … don’t know exactly what I’m about to do or what will happen.”

Vailret had finally agreed to take Delrael with him, leaving the golem alone to face Scartaris.

Journeyman felt a buzzing around him, power flickering unseen in the air. His body tingled when he moved ahead. Lights and echoes and frightening images floated around him, as if Scartaris was trying to frighten him away. But nothing could stop him now. He molded a determined expression on his face, squaring his shoulders.

The prospect of fulfilling his purpose brought him to a peak of ecstasy he had not known before. He felt his secret weapon growing inside, pulsing, ready to be released.

The Rulewoman Melanie would be so proud of him.

Ahead, he heard the sound of grinding rock, a restless, awesome force. The passage opened up, and Journeyman emerged onto a ledge overlooking a vast pit, the heart of the mountain.

Below him lay Scartaris.

Immense, huge beyond comprehension, bathed in colors that would have blasted human eyes from their sockets. Fluorescent orange and yellow and burning pink. Scartaris was a swelling, pulsing blob of energy, shaped like a vast brain the size of a small mountain.

The golem sensed vibrations around him. The air itself throbbed and pushed at him as he stepped to the edge. The rock tensed, as if Scartaris could collapse the mountain on a whim, but Journeyman didn’t hesitate. He stood glaring down at the Outsider David’s monster. He planted his balled fists on his hips.

“You know I’m here, Scartaris. But you don’t know enough to be afraid,” he shouted down into the roar. The colors on the blob shifted and moved. Scartaris was listening to him.

He craned his head down on his flexible clay neck. “The Outsider David created you—and the Rulewoman Melanie created me. You show off your power in extravagance. I carry mine hidden. The Rulewoman placed it in me. She knows your vulnerability.”

Scartaris shifted and rose up. Disturbed rocks pattered down from the ceiling. All the air around Journeyman seemed like a bowstring ready to snap, but he continued, spilling his words like a well rehearsed speech.

“We are only imaginary characters created by the Outsiders. We have one great weakness, something none of us can withstand. It’s a simple thing, a speck of dust from Outside, a piece of another world that is so deadly to us.

“The Rulewoman Melanie brought it here, painted it into the map, inside me. It has made me see visions, made me speak of things beyond the boundaries of Gamearth.

“Now it must be released.”

Journeyman ran a finger down the length of his chest, pushing a crease into the soft clay like a long zipper. He plunged his hands into his own skin and split a seam down the middle. He opened himself up where his heart would have been. Out of the cracks spewed a powerful white light, blinding bright.

“Scartaris, behold the power of something you cannot possibly withstand. Gaze upon pure reality!”

The light blasted outward as the golem spread his chest wide, folding back his body to make a great window, showing his core.

“It worked!”

“What did you do, Mel!”

“God, look at that thing!”

“David, you’re sick. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s real! I can’t believe it—it’s real!”

“No, we’re real. And nothing there can stand it.”

Journeyman did not dare look himself, but he listened to the astonished voices. One of them set him trembling, and he recognized the Rulewoman Melanie. He felt the clay dissolving from the inside out as his core of reality poured out.

Scartaris made an agonized wail that ripped through the seams of the map itself and caused all the fighters on the battlefield to stagger on their feet. He lurched back, quivering against the jagged walls of the stone chamber. Journeyman knew he could not get away.

Scartaris could not withstand even the sight of naked reality. He began to wither and shrivel as parts of the great bulk sloughed away into nothing, fading.

Delrael felt his ears ringing with a roar of blood, and he could not focus his eyes. Somehow, Vailret was beside him, pulling him to his feet, dragging him out of the grotto. His vision went dim again, then sharpened around the edges.

Vailret bent over and picked up the silver belt on the floor. The Earthspirits! Pieces fell into place in Delrael’s mind.

“Del, can you hold this? Do you want to carry it?”

He grunted and nodded his head, but that made the rushing sound inside grow louder. The cold air snapped into his eyes, and after several breaths he felt more alert.

“Mindar—” he said. His voice came out in a croak.

“She’s dead,” Vailret answered. “She died de fending you from the Slac, I think. Is that what happened? Is that how you got injured?”

The memories came clear in his head, and Delrael stumbled on the steep path. Vailret caught him and held him up, thinking his cousin still too weak to run. Delrael hurried along—Vailret didn’t know the truth about Mindar. She would have wanted it that way.

“Yes. That’s what happened.”

Vailret led him down a steep, narrow path on the other side of Scartaris’s mountain, down to the black hex-line in front of the battlefield. They ran, and Delrael found his strength coming back. The dizziness drifted away from him. “Journeyman—?”

Vailret hesitated, then tugged on his cousin’s arm. They crossed the hex-line and staggered onto the soft dirt of the desolation terrain. “He’s gone to Scartaris, to use the Rulewoman’s weapon. He told us to run as far as we can.”

The other monsters on the battlefield seemed to have lost their heart for the fight. Delrael turned and looked up at the jagged lair of Scartaris. The strange lights were flashing in wild colors.

Gairoth stood panting in the opening of the grotto as he looked back out at the massed dim soldiers far below. He had climbed half the mountain, it seemed. His feet hurt. The wound in his ankle from the Slave of the Serpent throbbed and made him angry.

He didn’t know what the fighting was about, why the monsters had gathered. He only wanted to find Delroth. He suspected the fighter had something to do with it all. Delroth always made trouble.

Inside the grotto bright lights flashed different colors from a tunnel at the far end. The sight gave him a headache. On the floor he saw two bodies, one woman and one Slac. He curled his lip.

He squinted his one eye and stared down the tunnel, but he could not make out the source of the flashing lights, the throbbing roar that clutched at the back of his head. Gairoth didn’t want to think about it. He was too tired and too angry.

The burning colors seemed to beckon him. Yes, Delroth must be down there, down in the tunnel. Gairoth stooped under the low ceiling. He would sneak up on Delroth, find him, and bash him. He made sure not to drag his club against the floor as he worked his way forward.

Gairoth thought of his lost dragon Rognoth and of his flooded cesspools. All Delroth’s fault. The ogre snarled and ground his teeth together as he stomped forward, then remembering the need for stealth, tried to move quietly again.

Gairoth squeezed the end of his spiked club. He had followed Delroth across the map, and now he would get his revenge.

But when he moved past the last turn, the ceiling opened up above him into a huge vaulted cavern. He stopped and wheezed. The light danced in front of his eyes, some of it real, some of it burning reflections on his retinas.

He sensed something was wrong. Something was going on. The bright lights and the heat and the roaring power channeled into the center of the mountain seemed to be screaming, fighting back in ways that Gairoth could not understand.

Then he noticed Journeyman. The golem had his back turned and stared down into the pit, shining something out of his chest.

The clay man had been with Delroth! Back in the forest, he had smashed Gairoth on the head and helped steal the little ylvan. The ogre frowned. If he could not get Delroth right now, he would at least get this clay man.

He stepped up behind Journeyman on the ledge, raised his club to his shoulder, and belched out a loud “Haw! Now I got you!”

He drew back his club to swing, smiling, peeling his thick lips away from brown teeth.

Startled, the golem turned around, pivoting on a flexible clay waist. Gairoth saw that he had opened up his chest—but his insides seemed to be a bottom less window, an opening shining out into some other place. He gawked at the vision, and for a fraction of a second he saw four humans crouched and staring down at him. Strange objects were scattered around the table along with food and colored dice.

“It’s Gairoth!”

Someone bumped over a glass and scrambled to catch it, spilling soda.

Gairoth gaped his mouth like a dying fish and then the reality of what he was seeing struck him. Bright light washed over him and into him.

He felt a blinding wonder, and despair, as his skin seared away, disintegrating into nothingness. A long, low “Awwwww.…” echoed in the air.

With nothing to hold it up, his spiked club dropped clattering to the ledge, bounced once, and pitched over to vanish in the molten blob of Scartaris.