Game Play (17 page)

"I'll bash
your head in, Delroth! BAM!"

Gairoth charged
across the desolation before night could take his quarry from him.

INTERLUDE: OUTSIDE

Melanie turned her
head to blink her eyes furiously. The tears stung.

She walked into
Tyrone's kitchen before anyone could see the wet tracks on her cheeks. She
clinked the ice cubes in her glass to emphasize that she was really just going
to get more soda.

The others remained
quiet, exhausted from the game. No one else seemed to get so close to their
characters. David sat flushed from his victory.

Melanie could still
feel where the sharp corners of the dice had bit into her palms.
Damn!
, she
kept thinking. All that rolling for combat, engagement after engagement. She
had saved four of them.

But Tallin had
died.

"Sorry,
Mel," Scott said. She turned around to look at him, reacting a little too
quickly. Behind Scott's glasses she could see concern in his eyes.

He alone had not
taken part in the Anted battle, preferring to set up the details for his own
turn.

"Wow, wasn't
that a great combat!" Tyrone grinned from ear to ear, excited Then he
noticed the wounded look on Melanie's face. "What's the matter? Don't be pissed
off just because one of your characters got killed."

Melanie glared at
him with such intensity that Tyrone shrugged and lowered his voice. "Well,
we could always change the rules if you want. Plenty of game systems let you
bring characters back after they've been killed once
―
"

"No!"
David snapped. He remained at the table, studying the map and his notes, as if
he didn't want to take a break between turns. "We decided against that a
long time ago. We're not going to change the rules just because she wants to
pout. Besides, Tallin was the second character Melanie introduced tonight. It
was fair combat, and I won."

"
We
won," Tyrone said. "I played, too."

"David is
right," Melanie said. Her voice was so quiet she couldn't believe she was
agreeing with him. "I don't want complete power over life and death. We
played by the rules. My character lost his combat rolls." She swallowed,
but found her hands shaking as she filled the glass.

Just because one
of your characters got killed
, Tyrone had said.

Melanie kept her
lips pressed together. That's all it was to them -disposable characters, names
and scores they rolled. Puppets to fight and find treasure and get killed. No
wonder David found it boring. He had no emotional stake. He didn't care about
anything but ending the game. Melanie cared about the rest of it.

The death of Tallin
was a sharp ache in her.

"At least I
learned what Melanie's trying to do with her characters and her secret
quest," David said. He smiled and leaned back in the chair. "But hiding
the Earthspirits in a belt? Don't know where you came up with that idea, Mel,
but it isn't going to work. I'm not sure we should even allow it."

He took off his
black denim jacket and draped it over the arm rest, then reached forward to
scoop up more of Tyrone's dip.

"If it won't
work anyway, then why bother complaining about it?" Scott said with a half
smile. "You're the one who keeps wishing the game would get more
interesting
―
let Mel take a few more risks."

"Sounds like
fun to me," Tyrone said. David scowled, trapped by his own complaints.

Melanie stopped
herself from saying that she had nothing to do with the Earthspirits in
Delrael's belt
―
any more than she had conjured up the Deathspirits
to stop Enrod.

It was the game
playing itself again.

That sent a thrill
up her spine, pushing aside some of her sadness at Tallin's death. She knew
something strange was happening with Gamearth. They all knew it. The characters
were doing things with their lives outside of the Sunday gaming sessions.

Melanie made a
smile of her own, hard and businesslike. She sat back down at the table.
"Your
characters
don't know about the Earthspirits, David, so you can't
do anything about it. Ryx is the only one who knew, and she's dead."

"Good point."
Scott joined them, slouching down in his chair.

"In fact,
David, you can't even prepare for my characters, because you officially don't
know about their quest. Because of Tarne, Scartaris thinks Delrael is dead and
the Fire Stone is still hidden somewhere at the Stronghold."

David drummed his
fingers on the table. "I have so many armies camped around Scartaris that
nothing could ever get through. I've gathered all the Slac, I've teamed up all
the wandering monsters, stirred up some old antagonisms. There's a larger pool
of monster fighters here
―
" he tapped the painted map over
the mountains of Scartaris, "than we ever brought together for the old
Sorcerer wars."

He cracked his
knuckles. "Your characters will never get through, Mel.

I have no doubt of
that."

Melanie glared at
him, but to her surprise Scott was the one who made a comment. "Well,
David, we'll just have to wait and see. We've got other characters in this
game, you know, not just the ones Melanie's playing."

He picked up the
dice and pointed at one of the hexagonal map sections near the city of
Sitnalta. "I'm starting there. It's my turn."

"We must
continue to learn, continue to study. As Sitnaltans, our quest is to understand
everything about the Rules and how they affect our lives.

With such an
intimate knowledge perhaps we can defeat the Outsiders and free ourselves from
this Game."

―
Professor Verne,
speech to the Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers.

Mountain air
whistled around the empty turrets of the ancient Slac fortress. The sky above
the excavation site was clear and cold and painfully blue.

Professor Verne
rubbed his hands together and pushed them deep into his pockets as he walked
back and forth outside the fortress. The other Sitnaltan engineers worked
meticulously on the Outsiders' ship. When Verne blew steam from his mouth,
clumps of frost made his full beard spiky.

Overhead the wide,
blind wall of the citadel was dotted with black spikes and narrow windows from
which the Slac could fire down on visitors.

Moss crept up the
walls, brown and green. A pool of stagnant water half filled a pitted cistern.

The bulk of the
Outsiders' vessel lay half buried in the dirt of the courtyard. Boulders and fallen
stone blocks from the abandoned fortress had dropped around it.

Vailret and blind
Paenar had told Verne and his colleague Professor Frankenstein about the ruined
ship. Apparently, the Outsiders David and Tyrone had used it to travel to
Gamearth, bringing with them a destructive monster to plant in the east. In
exchange for this information, Verne and Frankenstein had constructed new
mechanical eyes for Paenar.

"Did you find
anything else?" Verne shouted down. He sucked on his lips, making his gray
beard protrude. The tip of his nose felt numb in the cold mountain air.

"We don't
know," Frankenstein called back from below. He cocked his head up at the
other professor. "We haven't figured out what most of this is yet."

Frankenstein had a
flushed face and close-cropped dark hair. His eyes bore a fiery, obsessive
look, part of his impatient temperament. But Verne found Frankenstein's ideas
exciting, and the two professors collaborated well together.

The two of them
held more patents than any other inventors in Sitnalta's history. Verne himself
didn't even know the total number anymore -nor did he care. The main point was
inventing things, creating things, bettering life for the characters in
Sitnalta. Some said the two professors were inspired directly by the Outsider
Scott, who watched over the technological city.

In the barren
courtyard, the Outsiders' ship had crumbled after many turns of disuse. Twisted
ribs of metal and cross girders outlined the great size of the fallen hulk. The
controls and engines were hidden and difficult to decipher, buried deep beneath
the ground. Verne urged the other Sitnaltan workers not to experiment with any
devices they found around the ship. He didn't want someone opening up an
uncontrolled vortex to
reality
, where they would all be annihilated in an
instant.

Professor Verne
brushed off his knees and walked down the path into the wreckage of the ship.
Around him, remnants of the hull looked as fragile as an eggshell, but patches
of the metal gleamed pure and uncorroded, with rainbow colors that Verne had
not seen in any alloy produced in Sitnalta. He stood beside the other
professor.

"Some of our
analytical machines still won't work," Frankenstein snorted. "The
electrical ones are the worst."

"We are
standing on the technological fringe, Victor. What else can we expect?"
Verne bent over to inspect the place where tiny perfect rivets joined two metal
sections together. "I am surprised even the mechanical instruments function
as well as they do."

Verne drummed his
fingers on his chest. In Sitnalta the characters had developed science and
technology enough to overthrow the Rules of magic that held sway for the rest
of Gamearth. As the Sitnaltans used their technology more and more, they
expanded the radius in which it worked out to a point where science and magic
held each other uneasily at bay. Verne called this point the
"technological fringe."

The Outsiders' ship
lay squarely on the boundary.

A team of three Sitnaltan
women in work clothes and lab coats sat concentrating on their sketch pads,
measuring and recording detailed portions of the ship. Two other Sitnaltan
workers used fine brushes to remove dust and debris from the wreckage.

One burly man,
sweating and exhausted, was put to work moving rocks and some of the fallen
girders. His face was flushed in the cold air, and he looked put upon because
of his strength. Verne smiled encouragement at him.

"Can't we rig
up some pulleys and a winch over here to help this man?"

Frankenstein
called. "Come on, you're supposed to be engineers!" Two of the technicians
hurried to implement the scheme.

Just the presence
of the ship itself awed Verne. So alien, so unlike anything else he had seen
before. He always had a sense of wonder at how things worked. But this ship was
tangible evidence of a visit from the Outsiders. What they would learn just
from the shapes of things, the construction, the way the metal was held
together
―
it would give the characters of Sitnalta many turns of
intense study.

If they had many
turns left in the Game.

Vailret and his
companions had brought news of how the Outsiders planned to end the Game. Most
of the other Sitnaltans scoffed at the idea. But Frankenstein and Verne had
picked up the energy readings of something powerful, something malignant,
growing in the eastern section of the map. Only Vailret had been able to
explain this anomaly to the professors' satisfaction.

Gamearth would be
doomed if they did not find some way to destroy this monster from the Outside.
The ship was the key, Verne felt. Perhaps with what they learned from it, the
Sitnaltans could find some solution, or some escape.

Maybe they could
develop a weapon with which to fight back, or maybe, if they could discover how
the vehicle worked, they could all escape to a different world.

It had always been
a Sitnaltan dream to find a way for human characters to make a Transition of
their own, as the old Sorcerer race had done with magic. Human characters
should be able to do the same thing
―
with science.

Verne had never
heard of a spell yet that could not be imitated by properly developed
technology.

"Professors!
Come here, we've found something," a woman's voice called.

Verne squinted into
the shadows of the wreckage and recognized Mayer, the daughter of the Sitnaltan
inventor-cum-bureaucrat Dirac. The tone in her voice suggested something
important, and Verne and Frankenstein hurried.

They passed through
a broken doorway down a tilted metal staircase into a chamber that had been
buried in the dirt. Over the past three days, Mayer's team had excavated the
room. Dust and dirt still caked the controls and equipment, but a team of men
and women used gloves, trowels, and heavy brushes to clean the area. An older
woman technician scrambled past the professors, carrying a bucket filled with
debris up the groaning stairs to dump it in the courtyard.

Mayer stood there,
her short dark hair mussed. Dirty handprints covered her lab coat, but she
indicated a polished bulkhead with gleaming panels of buttons and dials. She
crossed her arms over her chest and watched the reactions of the two
professors, allowing the discovery to speak for itself for a moment. Then she
could restrain herself no longer.