Gameplay (16 page)

Mindar nodded and turned to the door. “Let’s get going.”

Delrael approached one of the horses skeptically, a mottled brown gelding that appeared calm enough. He ran his palm along the horse’s shoulders and then, trying not to look inexperienced, he scrambled on the gelding’s back. Delrael held onto the mane and swayed, finding his balance. The horse felt warm and vibrant under him, strong and alive.

“Don’t worry,” Mindar said, “You’re a fighter character. You’ll ride easily. It’s natural for you. Part of your characteristics.”

Vailret watched his cousin, then worked his way onto the other horse. Bryl frowned, then Journeyman picked him up bodily and set him in front of Vailret. The horses seemed anxious to leave the stables. Outside in the street again, Mindar mounted her own mare.

She stopped in the square in front of the stables to where an iron bell, embossed with flower patterns, hung over a stone foundation. Four Tairans shuffled from one building to another, keeping their heads down and slouching. Their gray clothes and sunken expressions made it impossible for Delrael to tell if they were even male or female characters.

Mindar removed the whip from around her waist and, holding onto the gray mare’s mane with one hand, she lashed out and struck the bell. A
gong
echoed through the streets.

The Tairans looked up, gawked at her for a moment, then moved back inside. Mindar struck the bell again with the whip and waited. Nothing stirred in the buildings. Her expression turned dark and stormy. Tears glistened in her dark eyes. She rang the bell twice more, then hung her head. “Tairé has died,” she said. “That bell should have brought all characters in the city flocking to see what the danger was.” She fastened her whip, then urged the mare forward.

“We’ll give them some danger.”

* * *

The smithy stood by itself, surrounded by smoke and noise. On three sides, the alleys were broader than usual. One wall of a nearby building had been knocked down to give greater access for raw material to be shipped in, for weapons to be carried away. The rubble lay where it had fallen; white chips and broken brick showed that the wall had been intact not long before.

Smoke curled into the bright, hot sky; feathery black stains smeared the smithy walls. A mound of pig iron lay piled near the door. From the inside came gusts of heat and banging sounds as Tairans worked on swords and shield frames.

“What are we going to do?” Vailret said, squinting his eyes as if deep in thought. “We can’t burn it.”

“I can still cause a lot of damage.” Journeyman smacked his fists together.

“We don’t need to destroy the buildings,” Mindar said. “This is still my city. It won’t do any good to save Tairé if we ruin it in the meantime. 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.

Tairé 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: horse carts 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.