Game Play (26 page)

We'll destroy the
forge and the hearth
―
that will ruin things so they can't be used
to make swords." She stared at the smithy wall with a gaze that seemed to
bore through stone. "That'll be enough for now."

Delrael climbed
down off his horse and steadied himself against the gelding's back.
"Vailret, you and Bryl stay out here and watch the horses. The three of us
can handle this."

"You bet your
life!" Journeyman said.

"Funny you
should put it that way," Mindar said.

Inside, the smithy
was dark, lit only by orange, smoky fires. Delrael choked on the stench of
sulfur and hot iron. The clang of hammers on anvils rang out in the air.

Five Tairan men
worked at the anvils, three women tended hot ingots in the forge. Another
hauled pig iron from the pile outside. Their tunics had either burned away or
torn off. Red welts and black scars on their skin showed where they had been
seared by sparks; the untended wounds festered.

Mindar held her
sword in front of her. "Stop what you're doing!" she shouted into the
noise.

The Tairans turned
to look in unison with blank-eyed stares, then they continued their work, banging
against the anvil. She had to yell. "Stop that, I said!"

Delrael strode
forward and wrenched the mallet from one of the Tairan's hands. "Drop your
hammers!"

Journeyman came
forward and yanked mallets out of the other hands. The mindless men continued
to raise and lower their arms for a few moments, then they stood with hands
loose at their sides.

"Better move
fast, before they figure out what's going on," Mindar said.

Delrael started
hacking at the bellows with his sword, severing the pulley ropes. Mindar bent
to her knees and used the strength in her back and arms to tip over an anvil.

Journeyman, with a
huge grin of glee on his face, picked up an anvil and threw it into the
stone-rimmed forge. The heavy iron smashed into the chimney bricks and punched
a hole through. With another broad clay hand, he grabbed one of the stone
support pillars in the center of the room and jerked it free, toppling a
portion of the ceiling. The golem sputtered and brushed dust off his arms.

The Tairans stood
blinking at them with murky expressions. Mindar swatted one of the workers with
the flat of her blade. "Go on, get out of here! You can't do anything
more."

The three of them
herded the Tairans into the street. As a parting effort, Journeyman knocked
down the columns in the front of the building, making the facade collapse and
closing off the front of the smithy.

Several other
Tairans stumbled out of buildings, watching with their unblinking gaze.

"Well, that
was exhilarating!" Journeyman said.

Mindar mounted her
gray mare. "We have to keep moving before they second-guess us. Scartaris
enjoys watching me fail
―
he won't put up with this for
long."

She turned the mare
around and set off at a trot down the angled street. Delrael tried to figure
out how to guide his gelding, but the horse followed Mindar on its own.

Taire waited in
dead silence. Delrael could sense other characters watching through the blind
windows, looking at them with the pupilless eyes of Scartaris....

A chemical, rotting
stench told him they had reached the tannery. On an adjacent wall Delrael saw a
fresco of a dark-haired man he recognized, flowing black beard and fiery eyes
―
Enrod the Sentinel, wielding the Fire Stone to shine light on the desolation.
The optimism in the artist's conception seemed to mock them all.

Delrael imagined a
time when the streets had not been silent: horsecarts taking characters to the
reclaimed hexagons for work in the fields.

He thought of
Tairans talking, doing business, even squabbling with one another. Scartaris
had taken all that away.

The tannery was one
of the larger buildings in the city, now modified by adding shutters to close
off the windows. A gate stood ajar on crude hinges in front of a stained
leather curtain that hung over the entrance. Smoke from fires used to cure and
dry the stretched leather drifted out of the window openings like fat snakes.
Outside the building lay stacked rows of finished shields, varnished leather coverings
over a sturdy iron frame. The bad smell forced Delrael to take short, hitching
breaths.

"I don't see
why we have to do this," Bryl said, mumbling his words. He covered his
nose with the blue cloak. "If we've got the last horses, there's no more leather
for shields
anyway
."

Mindar glanced at
him with a strange look on her face. Her smile might have been wry if the
expression hadn't been so bleak. "Horses are much too valuable to
Scartaris. He would never use them just for leather."

She blinked her
eyes at the piled shields, the pale, discolored leather glinting off the iron
frames. Disgust distorted her face.

"But if it's
not horsehide, then
―
" Bryl began.

"Shut up,
Bryl!" Vailret snapped. His face turned greenish.

"We must
destroy this place," Mindar whispered.

She dismounted and
drew her sword. "Come on, Delrael. We'll get the people out, then Bryl can
destroy it with the Fire Stone. Enrod would want that, burn it clean."

Without waiting for
him, Mindar strode to the front of the tannery.

Delrael took three
running steps to catch up to her. She pulled open the iron gate, letting it
clang against the far stone wall. She used the tip of her sword to slash across
the sewn leather curtain and let it fall to pieces. Her boots stomped it flat
as she entered the building.

Delrael followed
her into the firelit dimness. The stench hung in the air like foul liquid
pressing into his lungs. Irritated tears formed in his eyes, but he blinked
them away.

"We won't fail
this time, Scartaris," Mindar said at the shadows around her.

Delrael's knuckles
whitened around the hilt of his sword. Other Tairans moved in the large, but
somehow claustrophobic, room. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he staggered
from the grisly sight around him.

Four Tairans
grappled with a wooden frame, stretching a skin on a rack.

Another woman took
a flat knife and began scraping the back of the skin.

Entrails, bones,
and waste leather lay piled in deep stone vats, dripping in pools of clotting
blood.

Against the walls
sat basins filled with brine solutions, lime, and tanning chemicals, each
stuffed with ragged skins. A covering of ash was scattered on the floor to soak
up the blood. Brownish-red footprints left aimless trails in the gray ash.

Racks of drying,
treated skins hung from the stone arches, showing vague, distorted shapes of
what had once been arms and legs. Piles of finished leather lay stacked in the
dim corners, waiting to be mounted on shield frames.

The orange light
from torches and braziers flickered with the air coming in now that the leather
curtain had been torn down. Mindar let out a strangled cry at the scene, and
Delrael closed his eyes with a wince, then forced himself to open them again.
He was a fighter, after all. He should have been immune to the sight of gore
and carnage.

A mound of human
heads, useless for their leather, were piled high in the corner. Their soft
jelly eyes stood open in a blank expression of terror.

Some of the mouths
hung open, dry and black inside.

Then Delrael noticed
something that made the nausea surge up inside him. These eyes weren't the
pupilless white of the other empty Tairans
―
they were normal,
terror-stricken, brown irises and blue. Scartaris had given them back their
minds an instant before death, letting them know what they had done and what
was going to happen to them.

"You
bastard!"

Delrael bent over,
feeling his chest and stomach muscles spasm. This was foul and unfair.
Scartaris did not play the same Game
―
no glorious combat with
heroic deeds. Just slaughter, no honor or challenge or excitement.

How could Scartaris
enjoy this?
Always have fun ...
Such a warped character, even a monster, had
to be destroyed.

The dead Tairan
eyes stared up from the mound of heads. The pupils seemed dilated in the dim
firelight.

He squeezed his
eyelids shut and was sick on the ash-covered floor of the tannery. He wheezed
and coughed.

The other Tairan
workers stopped what they were doing and stood facing them. They all wore
identical, broad grins.

Delrael lurched
back to his feet, closing his hand around the sword hilt. Stinging tears came
to his eyes. Mindar gripped him by the shoulder to be sure he was all right,
but he shrugged her off and lunged forward to slash at the drying skins on the
racks overhead.

"Let's get the
people out of here so we can bring this place down," he said. He grabbed
one of the motionless Tairan workers and jerked him toward the door. The man
stumbled, without cooperating or resisting. Delrael pushed him out the door. He
wasted less time shoving the next person out.

Mindar went to the
three other workers, but they suddenly moved and grabbed her around the
shoulders. Taken by surprise, she lashed out and struggled, but they held onto
her arms. The third Tairan went to the cluster of hanging skins, loosened a
dangling rope and let two intact bodies fall to the floor, one large and one
small. With a thump, they sprawled on their heads, stiff arms and legs cracking
into awkward positions. They lay in the blood and ash.

Delrael ran to help
Mindar
―
but the Tairans were not trying to hurt her. One of them
grabbed her head and turned it so that she had to look, had to
see
.

The two bodies were
naked, but preserved by the tannery's processes -a man and a small child, a
daughter. Dried blood and claw marks scored their flesh. Both faces held a
fixed look of terror and eyes that were
not
milky-blank, but contained a
pupil and dark iris, a mind, a soul.

"No!"
With a scream, Mindar threw herself away from the Tairan workers and went wild
with her sword, striking down both Tairans who held her. Her rippled blade
slashed across the face of the third Tairan, obliterating the empty white eyes.
Delrael drew his sword, but Mindar needed no help.

"No, Scartaris..."
She hunched over the torn bodies of her husband and daughter. Her voice
trembled in the silence of the tannery. She reached out to touch Cithany's
stiff shoulder.

Delrael stood
behind her. "We have to go." He placed his hand on her back.
"Let's destroy this place."

Mindar slid shut
the brittle eyelids of her daughter, brushed her fingers over the face of her
husband and then closed his eyes as well. "Now you can't see any more of
what Scartaris is doing to our city."

Delrael took her
arm to guide her. Mindar lurched out of the tannery and stumbled on the
slippery flagstones. She fell to her knees, retching, then scrambled back to
her feet. She held her sword in both hands and lashed back and forth at
imaginary demons. Her eyes were clouded and gushing tears. Her lips drew away
from her teeth in an angry snarl.

The others stepped
back. She screamed and seemed unable to catch her breath.
"Scartaris!" Mindar turned around in circles with the sword and then stopped
as if grabbed by a giant hand. "You will pay for this."

She staggered
toward Bryl. "Use the Fire Stone. Burn that place! Bring it down!"

"Is there
anyone left inside?" Bryl asked.

"Burn
it!" Mindar screamed. She reached out and grabbed his blue cloak, pushing
him back toward the stone wall of another building. Bryl lost his footing and
slipped, but she held onto his cloak and propped him up. "Burn it, I
said!"

Her smoldering eyes
seemed to cut through him. Delrael took a step forward, then hesitated, afraid
to touch her, afraid that Mindar might explode or lash back at him with her
rippled sword. He didn't want to hurt her, and he didn't think she wanted to
hurt him either.

She wanted to hurt
Scartaris. That was all for now.

"Do it,
Bryl," he said.

Hands shaking, the
half-Sorcerer took out the eight-sided ruby. "Move your feet. Give me some
room."

Bryl stood, brushed
himself off, then rolled the ruby. The Fire Stone clacked on the flagstones,
showed a "6."

Mindar whirled to
point at the tannery. Bryl grabbed the Fire Stone and launched fireballs with
all the strength of his high roll.

Stone splinters
from the tannery exploded outward as Bryl hurled crackling spheres of flame.
Inside, the doors buckled. Roof shards erupted into the air; smoke belched
through the window slits, reeking of burned skin, oily wood, and vats of
preserving chemicals.

The tannery
collapsed with a long, low rumble. The wide walls of two nearby buildings
cracked with the concussion. Smoke curled around the wreckage up into the air
again.