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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] "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 Taire." 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 waste. "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 Taire, 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 mixup 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?" -------- *Chapter 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |