Kevin J Anderson (29 page)

"Do me one thing, for the memory of my father," Tareah said. She pointed at Enrod. "He was upset because you never once came here to see the history he had compiled. Go to the vaults yourself. Look at what he kept from past turns.

"You insist on looking toward the future, and that's good. But the past might hold some surprises for you, too. Go to the vaults. You might be impressed."

Enrod drew himself up and looked at her with his ageless eyes. "I will." With a slight bow, he stepped backward and walked away. As he moved, he drew his fingernail along the wall.

Tareah held the Water Stone in her hands, thinking about what else Enrod had said. She already knew what she had to do.

Tareah tried to sleep. She lay in a re-creation of her old chambers. With her mind and her imagination she had rebuilt the room exactly as she remembered it, making the same polished furnishings, the same frost-intaglios in the walls, even to the single narrow window that now looked out upon the massed and huddling monster army on the ice-packed desolation. She could see only three or four small fires out there, apparently made with their limited supply of wood.

Delrael's army would be asleep by now, except for a few sentries she could easily avoid.

Tareah wandered the blue-ice corridors again, just as she had always done when she couldn't sleep. During the day the walls shimmered with rainbows from the sunlight; at night she saw only dark and refracted starshine. As a girl, sometimes she listened to her father tell legends that she already knew by heart.

That reminded her of the way she and Vailret had swapped stories back into the Stronghold village. She thought of Vailret and Bryl and how far away they must be. Surely by now they had managed to get the Earth Stone ― but how would they know to come all the way up here to the Ice Palace? They were supposed to locate the human army somewhere in the mountains. Originally, Delrael had planned to send regular scouts to search for them returning. Now, though, even if Vailret and Bryl did happen to come up here, how could they ever get past the tight cordon of monsters?

They could do enormous damage with the three Stones, blasting their way in ― but Bryl was only one magic user ... and spells could fail.

Tareah stopped and shivered from a cold that didn't come from the ice corridors. What if Bryl didn't succeed? What if all three Stones passed into the hands of the manticore? Normally she would have doubted that any monster could bear a taint of Sorcerer blood, but the ogre Gairoth had proven otherwise.

In the last days of the old Sorcerers, their race had been weak. They mated with the humans, trying to regain their fading magic; some of them, more desperate, had interbred with a few of their more horrendous creations. Who could say that in all of Siryyk's horde not one monster could bring magic from the Stones?

It was a foolish risk to take, she knew. Delrael, with his constant overprotection of her, had certainly lectured enough about senseless risks.

She descended a narrow staircase and got to the ground level of the ice fortress. The human army could survive a long seige within the battlements. They had many supplies, and Enrod could always replenish them.

Winter had fallen on the northern hexes, and even without the Water Stone's magic, the fortress would remain frozen for months. Tareah had done all she could here.

The need was greater elsewhere.

She slipped out a low side arch, one of the doorways Enrod had added for brief surprise strikes and retreats. He hadn't expected her to be the first character to use it.

Under a few stars that stood in black patches of night around clumps of clouds, Tareah approached the western wall of the defenses. Most of Siryyk's horde lay camped along the opposite side, but that didn't mean other sentries wouldn't be stationed around the fortress.

After midnight her allotment of spells had been replenished, and now Tareah took out the Water Stone. She rolled the sapphire on the ground but got only a "3." Though she felt the magic surging through her, the
dayid
must not be helping her this time. It did not want her to take the Water Stone away.

She walked forward into the wall.

The ice clarified and puddled around her hands, turning into water as she stepped through the blocks. The water shimmered and sealed behind her, refreezing as she stepped through. The ice trickled away in front of her, and she emerged on the other side.

Cold water dripped from her garments and her long hair, but a thought through the Water Stone left her warm again. Tareah called up a thick night fog to cover her movements from any monsters that might be patrolling the area.

She hurried across the snow, following her ears to the Barrier River, which lay only half a hex away. Her body felt refreshed and tingling from touching so much magic in so little time. But this would be only the beginning. She covered the distance in less than an hour.

At last, after all her studying of the Game and its legends, she had embarked on her own adventure.

Tareah stood on the hex-line where the rushing water poured through from the northern sea, gushing among the rocks and frothing with chunks of ice. Tareah fashioned a wide, flat raft of solid transparent ice that showed the water foaming beneath it in large bubbles. She stepped onto her raft, squatted down in the center, and detached it from the black hex-line of the shore.

With a lurch, her raft pushed southward, reeling away at the speed of the current, bouncing and twisting. She dug her fingers into the ice, melting handholds for herself. The raft swirled, and as the Water Stone spell continued, she called up waves in the current.

Giant blue hands of froth and spray rose up, one after another in a flurry, pushing the raft and then dissolving into the water again. A constant stream of the watery hands shoved her faster and faster, doubling the speed of the current so that the raft skipped and bounced over the river surface.

Tareah's hair whipped behind her, and she couldn't stop herself from laughing. The dim hexes of the shore sped past, blurry and dizzying at her rate of movement. The watery hands pushed and slapped her along.

She had two more spells to last the rest of the night. By morning she would be many, many hexagons away.

Enrod carried a flickering torch ― a
torch
, because he had used all his spells that day in rebuilding the fortress. The flames hissed and crackled. He held his hand near the fire to feel its warmth. The light glinted and flared along the ice stalactites.

He wandered among the museum Sardun had spent his lifetime compiling. Tareah's father had sent out human Scavengers, paying them for any relic they could uncover of the old Sorcerers, jewels or manuscripts or weapons or tiny keepsakes ― anything to legitimize his collection.

Sardun had annotated each object. Enrod found the blackened swords of two old Sorcerer generals, apparently the actual pair that the commanders had thrown into Stilvess Peacemaker's death pyre. Or was it some other pyre? Enrod couldn't remember.

Even before the fall of the Ice Palace, Sardun seemed to know that his museum would collapse, and he had taken great pains to preserve everything. Glowing protection wards and shielding fields hovered around all the relics. Though Enrod was the first to set foot in these restored vaults, everything seemed pristine, as it always must have been.

The vault spread out to the edges of the torchlight. Under a low ceiling in the far end he saw ranks of bodies positioned side by side with great reverence. These were the empty, dormant bodies of the old Sorcerers.

Most of the race had gathered together in the broad valley, Stilvess and other Sorcerer commanders sat in their tent, rolling and rolling dice until they achieved an impossible, perfect roll that would set off the Transition. All the old Sorcerers had waited there, except those who had chosen to remain behind like Enrod and Sardun.

After the Transition had worked and the lives of all the old Sorcerers had forged together into the Earthspirits and the Deathspirits, they had left their physical bodies behind, empty and dormant ― not dead, but not alive.

Sardun and the others had carried all of the bodies here and erected the Ice Palace as their monument. Over the years, Sardun arranged the figures, labeling each one with the name they had carried in life.

Enrod stood in the oppressive closeness of the vaults. He could imagine the long, slow intake of breath, perhaps only once every minute or two as the old Sorcerers inhaled in unison, then let out an equally interminable exhale. Their heartbeats seemed to echo like distant, widely spaced drumbeats: a faint thump, a long, long pause, and then a smaller thump.

Enrod thought about Sardun's demise. He could feel the
dayid
, he could feel all the lives of the Sentinels who had vanished in the interim years, calling upon the half-Transition to destroy themselves when they could no longer tolerate their lives. The voices whispered louder in his head.

Enrod looked out at the tomb of the undead Sorcerers and wondered if this was what they really wanted.

He turned away then and poked among the relics for a last few moments. In a small, unimpressive container he found the spell for invoking and commanding a gargoyle, one of the stone creatures formed by a single Sentinel's wandering spirit.

Enrod looked at the spell, realizing that it could be useful. Below it he found written a single name for the gargoyle to be summoned: ARKEN.

The next morning Delrael awoke refreshed and tingling with a new energy. The Game had turned in his favor, and he felt eager for it now.

His father had fallen in the battle, but Delrael could make it up to him if he won the war, if he saved Gamearth ― as Drodanis had charged him long ago in the Rulewoman's message-stick.

His army could rest and recuperate here. The fighters could strike at the horde whenever the monsters approached too close. Delrael had only to wait ― Vailret and Bryl held the key to the next step, the end game.

Delrael arose at first light and, before his other fighters could stir, he walked along the ice corridors and climbed one of the tall turrets to look out over the frozen desolation. The last scraps of an unusual morning fog blew away with the dawn.

On top he met one shivering sentry, a woman whose hair had blown about and tangled in the night breezes; she looked as if she had reached the limits of what she could endure. The cold air snapped the last of Delrael's weariness away as he stood beside the sentry.

"They're just starting to move now," she said. He listened to her teeth chattering.

He watched the forms of Siryyk's army. The horde moved around their main encampment like ants from a stirred-up colony. A few creatures had surrounded the ice fortress at strategic positions. But as the morning fog burned off, Delrael knew that the monster sentries had done little or no good in the darkness.

He watched a detachment of Slac march across the flat snow to reach higher ground, a hilly jumbled terrain of broken ice blocks and brown-stained snow. Plumes of steam poured up, like fumaroles from some underground volcanic vent.

But as the Slac detachment moved onto the hummocks, they suddenly scurried away. The ground began to move around them. The lumps cracked, and powdery snow blasted into the air. The steam thickened and gushed upward. A dark form burst out from beneath its blanket of snow and ice.

The Slac ran for their lives, dropping weapons and shields. Their black cloaks flapped behind them as they fled.

Great pointed wings snapped free of the ice. A long serpentine neck rose up, sporting a pointed head filled with jagged fangs. Snorts of flame gushed out of the beast's mouth, blasting two of the Slac. The enormous wings beat, lifting the entire form.

A huge, metallic-looking dragon rose into the air, sweeping cold gusts around it and craning its head. The morning sun glinted on blue and tarnished-silver scales. The dragon turned its head to stare down at the monsters that had disturbed it.

The dragon looked formidable, though relatively small for such a creature. Seen in comparison to the little Slac, though, it appeared immense indeed. The monsters mobilized toward the new threat. Delrael could make out the giant form of Siryyk striding out to direct his horde.

But the dragon flew up, circling around and shrieking down at the monsters as if greatly annoyed. It circled, and then flapped its wings again. Ice and snow flaked off, dropping to the ground in a jagged rain. The dragon let out another shriek and then swooped toward the ice fortress.

Delrael ducked back inside and started to charge down the tower steps four at a time, stumbling and leaping, shouting as he went. He heard other sentries sounding the alarm. A dragon had destroyed the Ice Palace the first time, when Sardun had tried to defend it; Delrael didn't know what
he
could do that Sardun hadn't tried. His words echoed throughout the corridors.

"Rouse everyone! We're under attack! A dragon! All characters to arms!"

The human fighters stirred as he burst into the main room below. Several grabbed weapons; others scrambled to get into armor; a few blinked groggily, fighting off a deep sleep. A handful of fighters followed Delrael out into the courtyard just as the dragon slapped up snow and ice crystals where it landed in an open spot behind the protection of the walls.

The dragon strutted around in the courtyard, blinking its eyes with audible clicks and breathing with the sound of wind moaning through a cave. "Bad monsters!" the dragon hissed in a broken, rumbling voice. The words sounded distorted from echoing out of such a long throat.

Delrael stopped, gawking up at it. The dragon seemed to have no hostile intent. He wondered if it merely sought refuge from further disturbance.

"No sleep! Bah!"

Then Delrael recognized a rubbed-raw scar on the dragon's throat where the scales had been worn away long ago and had never grown back. The reptilian skin was discolored and hard, but Delrael remembered the thick iron collar.

"Rognoth!" he said.

The dragon stopped, swished its long tail and smacked it into an ice wall. It curled the tail around its haunches with a startled hiss. "Rognoth," it said.