Kevin J Anderson (37 page)

Then he located where the ticking came from ― a large knob with painted numbers descending toward a red line marked on the device. Smears of blood ran down the metal, long fat fingerprints like the trails of infernal slugs. Verne had been trying to do something to this knob.

Delrael didn't know what the knob did; he didn't know what the entire device did. But some intuition ― based on what little he remembered from Sitnalta and the gadgets Mayer had explained ― told him that this had something to do with activating the device.

If so, then the numbers on the side showed exactly how to stop it. He gripped the knob with both hands, using all his strength to turn it clockwise.

Turning it toward zero. That would shut it off.

The clicking increased like a rapid rattle, and the red line moved quickly around.

Verne must have been clawing at the tight knob to do the same thing. Dying, the professor would never have been able to do it for himself.

Delrael twisted with his wrist. The zero approached, and he pushed harder. He would shut it off in just a moment.

Then his eyes flicked down, and he saw the curved smear of blood on the side of the knob. He stopped. It seemed too clear ― Verne had been trying to rotate the knob the
other
way.

Delrael squeezed the knob with all his fingers to arrest its motion. The clicking slowed, but continued as the slippery surface kept turning.

A second possibility occurred to Delrael: If this were a timer of some sort, then zero would be the worst possible point, the point where the weapon would detonate.

He turned the knob the other way, but it seemed locked, able to progress in only one direction. He bashed at it with his fist. Finally, he jerked the dagger from his belt and used the blade to pry off the knob. The tip of the blade snapped, but the knob popped out and clattered onto the floor. A thin central rod still turned inside the device, and the clicking continued.

Delrael jammed the broken dagger into the slot and pushed it with his palm, bending the entire mechanism until something twisted and snapped inside. The device fell silent.

He felt icy sweat burst out of every pore of his body. Behind him the ice fortress looked far away; the vehicle had sped across the flat terrain while he had been preoccupied.

Delrael looked up and saw the Barrier River yawning in front of him, a huge plain of water ahead, swirling and churning.

He leaped out of the car. He could hear the rushing current and wondered how he could have ignored it. Even the ticking of the weapon had not been so loud.

Delrael landed on his belly in the snow and coughed as his breath left him. He crawled to his knees, attempting to suck in air. He wanted to pull Verne's body free, to give the inventor some kind of safe burial.

But the steam-engine vehicle, still gushing gray-white exhaust from its stack, passed over the black hex-line, wobbled, then plunged into the deep and ice-choked Barrier River.

With a gurgle, the Sitnaltan car, its wheels still spinning, sank beneath the water, taking with it Professor Verne and the Sitnaltan weapon.

Delrael stood up and stared toward the ice fortress and the last part of the battle he was missing. It would be a long walk back.

Tareah scrambled among the broken chunks of rock and earth. Dust and pebbles still rained down, but she had reached the pile of debris that covered Bryl. She could see only deep shadows and jagged edges. The werem writhed in confusion; many had vanished into other catacombs.

"Bryl!" Tareah called. "Bryl!"

Vailret scrambled up to her and helped pull the rocks aside. Bryl had been kneeling there just a moment ago. "It's not fair! Not now ― we're too close to the end," he said. Dirt and terror smeared across his face.

With a grunt, he and Tareah rolled a large boulder away. She saw Bryl's bloodied hand looking pale and fragile. "There he is!" Tareah said. She worked harder. Vailret reached down to grasp the half-Sorcerer's hand and wrist. The thin fingers clenched in a weak but desperate response.

"Hurry!" Vailret said.

Together they uncovered most of Bryl's body. The avalanche had crushed and broken him. Blood streamed out of his mouth, but somehow his head had escaped severe injury. The rock fragments had smashed his rib cage as well as his legs. One arm was pulverized.

Bryl would not live much longer. His eyes were glazed and squeezed shut in pain, but he gasped out a single word, forming it around a scarlet bubble of blood. "Stones!" he said.

In his intact hand he still held the three Stones. Tareah knelt beside him, holding her Water Stone.

"Isn't he too weak to become the Allspirit?" Vailret said. "There's nothing we can do."

"He's still alive," Tareah said. "He could summon the magic. But you're right ― he is too weak."

She stared down at the frail form of the old half-Sorcerer. Enrod's disjointed words came back to her. 'Not even a pure Sorcerer. What kind of Allspirit would he make? Tainted! Tainted!'

Sardun had always insisted that within Tareah rested a great hope for the future, some important mission as the last of the old Sorcerer race.

She saw very clearly what she would have to do, how she could serve the destiny her father had claimed for her.

"I'll have to go with him. We can be the Allspirit together." She looked down at the dying half-Sorcerer. "My knowledge along with his experience, my enthusiasm and fascination along with his age and understanding of power."

Vailret looked at her in horror. "Are you crazy Tareah? You have to stay here, stay here with me!"

Tareah felt a longing in her heart when she looked at him. It was the first time he had said something like that to her. She understood her attraction now, with Delrael being the man she most admired, but Vailret the one to whom she felt the closest kinship. But even so, she felt the greater calling of her Sorcerer blood.

Tareah had worked so hard to fit in with the human characters, playing her role but never feeling comfortable with it. She had spent three decades isolated, burying herself in the history of the Game, in the Rules, in what characters must do. She had admired them all, studied the legends in an academic fashion, but now the choice weighed directly upon her.

She could decide between remaining with Vailret, which she would enjoy greatly, or taking on this responsibility ― a step as consequential as the old Sorcerers themselves choosing to take the Transition.

"No," Tareah said. "This is what I need to do, and you know it as well as I do."

Vailret stared at her with his eyes wide and devastated, seeing his friend Bryl dying and knowing she was about to depart as well. He moved his lips several times, but could say nothing. Tareah turned away from him; she couldn't face any doubts.

She took out her Water Stone and bent down to lift the three Stones from Bryl's bloody hand. She took his slick grasp in her own. He lay shuddering and dying, with only a moment left.

"We'll go together, Bryl."

She held the gems in her hand, feeling their heat, feeling their magic blinding her from the inside. Still grasping Bryl's wrist, she rolled all four Stones.

Vailret stumbled backward, shielding his eyes as light greater than an exploding star crackled out of the gems. White, blue, red, and green, soaring up to engulf both Tareah and Bryl, settling around them like incandescent snowflakes. Vailret couldn't tell exactly at what point he stopped seeing Tareah altogether, when she and Bryl became indistinguishable from the glare. The pinpoints of sorcery spread and grew and swelled into a blaze unrivalled since the Transition.

The remaining worm-men, with their thin gray skin unaccustomed to any sort of light, shrivelled backward as their bodies blackened. Those that did not die instantly fled deep into the earthen walls.

Vailret turned away from the brilliance, feeling a devastating sense of loss. In his mind he realized that he and Bryl had gone on their long quest for the sole purpose of bringing this about. But as he stared at the inferno of magic, he knew that Bryl was now as dead to him as if he had simply bled out his life on the grotto floor; only this way, Vailret lost Tareah as well.

But if this had gained a future for Gamearth and all its characters, a future for them to forge their own lives without the Outsiders, then perhaps, in a way that his mind understood but his heart did not, the sacrifice was well made.

When he looked up again, blinking colored spots from his eyes, the titanic Allspirit filled the grotto.

The Allspirit towered gray-white and hooded, bearing no resemblance whatever to Bryl or Tareah. Its features were hidden: the cloak seemed merely a metaphor, a symbolic boundary that defined the limits of its tangible existence. The form stood so immense that it seemed to fold in upon itself to fit within the walls, like infinity wrapped in a shroud.

Vailret couldn't speak or move. He held his breath.

The Allspirit stretched out its silently flapping sleeves. It paid no attention to Vailret or anything else in the ruins of the chamber.

Frankenstein peeped up over the edge of Drone and stared.

Vailret did not dare to make any noise. The Allspirit grew brighter with a wind of power, energy draining through the fabric of the map and into the Allspirit's body. Vailret wondered if it had drained the
dayid
from Rokanun ... and probably the other
dayids
as well. It seemed to reel with its own new power.

"NOW WE ARE MASTERS OF THE GAME." The sexless voice boomed out from the cavernous hollow in the hood. More stones and dust pattered down from the broken ceiling.

Vailret felt a surge of enthusiasm, then a chill as he realized that the Allspirit's "we" did not mean the characters on Gamearth, but only the plural identity of what had been Tareah and Bryl.

"LET US PLAY WITH NEW CHARACTERS."

With a wave of the flapping empty sleeves, another part of the wall cracked. But it wasn't an actual crack ― just a dark seam opening to somewhere else. More wind came out, this time with a silent roar that Vailret could not hear or feel, yet it buffeted him backward nevertheless.

Streaming out from other parts of the map, other parts of the universe perhaps, came the original six Spirits, three white and three black. Vailret remembered seeing the Earthspirits as they emerged, immense and awesome from Delrael's silver belt on the threshold of Scartaris. He remembered the black Deathspirits, who had cursed Enrod, rising up from the broken hex-line, also to destroy Scartaris.

Now, though, the Earthspirits and Deathspirits appeared much diminished. Colossal as they had been before, they now looked weaker, insubstantial in front of the dominating Allspirit. The Deathspirits and the Earthspirits remained silent, as if cowering.

Beside Vailret, Frankenstein stumbled over the motionless wreckage of Drone and stood gaping at the Spirits with mouth wide and eyes bulging. "This is impossible! This is astonishing," he mumbled to himself. Vailret glared at him.

The Allspirit spoke to the other six hooded forms. "NOW WE CAN PLAY. NOW WE CAN HAVE FUN."

The air sang with exerted power. The Earthspirits and Deathspirits flickered and struggled, but eventually buckled, crouching down in a symbolic bow to the Allspirit.

Vailret finally closed his eyes because he could not take in the immensity of the spectral shapes. The Allspirit's words sounded nothing like either Bryl or Tareah. The thoughts could not be theirs, but some sort of manifestation of the power in the Stones themselves, some reflection on the old Sorcerers who had created them ― the Sorcerers, dissatisfied with being manipulated by the Outsiders, who had taken the extreme step of the Transition in an effort to escape.

"Tareah, listen to me!" Vailret shouted. His voice sounded like a ridiculous squeak. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, expecting to be wiped out of existence in a moment. The invisible weight of the Allspirit's attention felt like a building collapsing across his back.

Vailret had nothing to lose. If the Allspirit didn't do what they needed it to do, then Gamearth was doomed, whether at the hands of the Outsiders, or the Allspirit itself.

"Remember why you're here! Tareah and Bryl ― remember why you gave your lives to create this! You must save Gamearth."

"WE WILL DO WHAT WE WISH TO DO."

The scorn in the Allspirit's voice made Vailret want to wither and throw himself over a cliff. But he shouted his next words through a raw throat, battering back his own emotions. They had to remember. Vailret had to make them see.

"Bryl, listen to me! Remember when you linked with the
dayid
to stop the forest fire in Ledaygen. You felt the power then, you know how dangerous it could be.

"Tareah, remember how Scartaris destroyed the Stronghold while you fought to save it. Remember how the power corrupted Enrod and made him want to use the Fire Stone for destruction!"

The Allspirit remained unmoved. Vailret continued to speak as fast as the words could tumble from his mouth.

"You knew this might happen! Think of the duel of Entarr and Dythat, when two rival Sorcerers unleashed such forces that swallowed them both up! You know all these legends Tareah! Remember the wedding celebration of Lord Armund and Lady Maire, and the disputed stone throw that sparked centuries of war?

"Bryl, think about how your parents were too weak to bear the accusations against them, so they used the magic to destroy themselves. Remember it! The power that's working through you now is not a part of you. You can't let it control you ― it has to be the other way around!
You
control the power."

The six Spirits remained silent, but the Allspirit spoke. This time the genderless echoing voice carried hints and undertones of Tareah or Bryl. "WE CANNOT FORGET. WE REMEMBER."

Vailret realized he had a new tactic. "Then remember how you took on this quest, to gather all four Stones together to become the Allspirit. The object of that quest was for you to hold Gamearth together by taking it away from the Outsiders.
That
was your quest ― remember Rule #2! 'Once characters undertake a quest,
they must see it through to completion!
'"