Kevin J Anderson (4 page)

One of Mostem's daughters opened the door at Tareah's knock. The three daughters each looked the same; Tareah could tell them apart only by the varying lengths of their dusty-brown hair. All three were squat, with turned-up noses and narrow, dull eyes. Kind enough, the type who would be described in their later years as "sturdy women." The girl blinked, as if trying to remember what she was supposed to say when guests came to the door.

"I need to see Vailret," Tareah said. "Is he working in here?"

Mostem's daughter opened the door wider. Tareah went in, paying her no further attention. The smells of fresh bread and yeast filled the main room, along with warmth from the wall on the other side of which Mostem housed his big ovens.

Vailret looked up at her and grinned, self-consciously brushing back his straw-colored hair. He had a thin nose and bright eyes that squinted too often. "Hello, Tareah!"

"Welcome, Tareah," Siya said from her seat against the wall. "While you're talking to my son, I'd appreciate a little help here." She motioned at a mound of weapons and armor in need of repair beside her.

After watching the Stronghold destroyed before her own eyes, Siya had adopted their cause wholeheartedly. She could wield none of the larger weapons, but Siya adapted her other skills to help administer the growing army after Delrael's call to arms. It was Siya who kept track of the numbers of trainees and where they came from. Siya managed the food distribution, found lodging for all of them ― she kept the practical matters running smoothly.

She spent the rest of her spare time repairing and cleaning the old weapons they had kept at the Stronghold or the relics brought in by trainees. Patched and restitched leather armor lay cleaned and smelling of sweet oil in a separate pile. She polished rust off of blades, sharpening and oiling them. Now, she took a fine metal awl and chipped out hardened dirt and mud from the mechanism of a crossbow.

"Plenty here to do," she said, indicating the heap again.

"Mother!" Vailret turned to her, scowling. "Tareah's been using all six of her spells every day to replenish our supplies. That should be enough." He turned to look at Tareah.

"Well, I have been doing that." She smiled at him, which seemed to set Vailret all aglow. "But I can still do something while I watch what you're doing."

Without looking, Siya picked up an ornate battle-ax and untangled some fresh leather thongs from a pile on the floor. "The handle here needs to be rewrapped. The old lacings got blood on them and started to rot."

Tareah used a knife blade to scrape the dark old leather from the ax handle and began twisting new thongs along the wood.

Vailret leaned over his table where he had spread out the huge map of Gamearth. He seemed to be showing off for her. Other characters had constructed the big master map over generations of exploring the world and adventuring. It had once been mounted on the Stronghold wall, but the collapse of the main building damaged it. Vailret used some of his own notes and talked to several old characters to reconstruct the details.

The flickering candles around the table made Tareah nervous that they would start the map on fire; a few specks of wax had spattered on the map itself. Siya always insisted that Vailret maintain enough light for his close work, especially with his weak eyesight.

Vailret squinted at two hexagons, trying to brush away smudges on a hex of forested-hill terrain. "After I get all the pieces together, I'm going to make several copies of the map for characters to have when we finally go on the march," he said. "We need to know where we're going. That'll save us lots of time."

Vailret flashed his gaze at her, as if sharing a secret. "Look here. With all the new characters coming in, we're learning about dozens of new villages. Either they're new settlements, or somehow they went undiscovered during all our years of questing!"

Siya snorted at him without looking up from her work. "Characters are settling down, Vailret. Lots of them stopped questing by the time your father was killed. All those characters had to live somewhere. What did you expect?"

Vailret ignored her. "And something else strange is happening, very strange. I've only just figured it out. Our couriers were told to move as fast as they could, to explore, to find all the villages and pass along the warning about Scartaris's army. Most of the couriers traveled their allotted number of hexagons and then stopped, out of habit. But some of them found that there's no restriction anymore! They can go farther. No matter what the
Book of Rules
says."

Tareah stopped her work with the ax handle and looked up at him. She felt a sudden rush of fear.

Vailret dropped his voice to a whisper. "With the Outsiders disrupting the Game, with the Earthspirits and Deathspirits coming back and Scartaris nearly destroying the map, and the great battle, and ... and with the piece of
reality
that Journeyman carried ― something is going very wrong with Gamearth.
Characters are breaking the Rules!
For now it's just travel restrictions that we know about, but maybe you can use more than your number of spells each day." He raised his eyebrows. "Who knows what else can happen?"

Tareah blinked at him in shock. "That can't be! The Rules are what hold Gamearth together. Without the Rules, we ... it would be chaos!"

"Maybe that's what we're in for, whether we win or lose."

Tareah tied off the leather thongs and set the ax on top of the mound of repaired weapons. She looked up to take something else from Siya, but the old woman had packed up her tools and stood up herself. "Come on, Vailret. Time to go," Siya said. "It's dark outside, and they'll be doing the quest-tellings again. You know how much you enjoy those."

Siya gave him what appeared to be a patronizing look, but Tareah knew that Siya enjoyed the quest-tellings as much as the rest of the villagers, especially now that she had become more interested in the battles. She always liked to hear legends about her husband Cayon and his quests with Drodanis.

Outside in the center of the village, the other characters had gathered around a bonfire made from the split trunks of some of the large trees; all of the smaller branches had already been used for making spears and arrows.

To start things off, one of the women characters from a mining village began telling how in her work underground she had broken into a network of catacombs that appeared ancient and well-traveled. Marveling at her discovery, she armed herself, took supplies, and set off to explore the tunnels, where many of the early quests of the Game must have taken place. She was gone a full day, mapping her progress and moving warily, eyes open for any sort of trap or attack. In the end, she found only a few scattered gems and dusty coins, and one broken skeleton of a misshapen monster. The dungeon was dead and empty, and she had not bothered to return again, though some of the children of her village occasionally played there.

Accompanied by five of his students, Delrael finally came striding into the village, finished with the last details of the day's training exercises. Tareah saw him, encased in a set of armor, well-muscled, confident in his abilities. He smiled at Tareah, Vailret, and Siya sitting together near the fire.

They shared food and sipped steaming cider from wooden mugs. Delrael looked very tired, but charged with a new kind of energy. After some coaxing from the others, he began telling of his battle with the Cailee, the shadow-thing that was the deadly alter-ego of their companion Mindar from Taire. As he spoke of how they had locked themselves in an underground storeroom, Tareah could picture them all waiting in darkness as the Cailee prowled just on the other side of the door, scratching at the wood with its long silver claws. Delrael told how the Cailee had attacked them out in the desert the following night, as they sat around their campfire, how it slaughtered Mindar's horse and thrown its head into the fire ―

A commotion among the gathered characters made Delrael pause in his story. Vailret squinted into the night. Tareah turned to see another figure approaching out of the twilight, a man dressed in dark and tattered clothes. He stumbled forward, seeming to emerge from the dark surrounding forests.

He came forward one step at a time, swaying, concentrating on his balance. Several of the trainees leaped up to steady the man, bringing him toward the firelight. His face was scratched and smeared with mud and grime. He looked gaunt and starving, with sunken eyes. Though they brought him close to the fire, the stranger continued to shiver violently.

"Well, get him some water or something!" Delrael shouted. Before he had finished his command, someone thrust a dripping ladle into his hand. Delrael poured it on the haggard man's mouth, not caring that most of it spilled down the stranger's chin.

The man gasped and turned to stare at all of them, as if suddenly realizing where he was. He seemed to melt. He looked dark of skin, with tangled black hair and strong calloused hands.

"Tell us your name," Vailret said, leaning close. "Where did you come from?"

The man's eyes flashed with alarm and he gawked at the fire as if it would reach out and consume him. "From Taire." He drew in a long, sucking breath, then slumped beside the fire.

FOUR STONES

"Yes, if all the Sorcerers depart from Gamearth, we leave behind human fighters to defend it ― but we also leave many enemies. We must give humans a greater advantage, a means to fight! We have much magic at our disposal. What are we going to do with it?"

― Arken, proposing that the old Sorcerer Council create the four Stones

Delrael stood up in the firelight and spread his arms as other characters pushed forward, chattering with each other. The stranger flinched at their sudden reaction. "Stand back!" Delrael shouted to overcome their noise. "Give the man room to breathe!"

The others backed off as the stranger sat slumped and crosslegged in the dirt, shivering despite the fire's warmth. His drab clothes, dark hair and skin reminded Delrael of Taire, the city where Scartaris had stolen the minds of all its inhabitants. Taire was the home of Mindar, the one woman somehow immune to Scartaris's control; she alone had attacked Scartaris's installations while the other Tairans unknowingly worked at creating weapons.

But this man had escaped from Taire. After the destruction of Scartaris, he had somehow made his way here.

Before Delrael could say anything else, Siya squatted down with a mug of steaming cider in her hands. She looked with disdain at the unmoving spectators. "Have him drink this."

The Tairan man took the mug and held it in both hands, but sat staring down at its surface. The trembling in his body caused tiny ripples to flow across the top, disturbing his reflection. He finally took a sip.

They all sat in silence. Delrael realized they were waiting for him to ask the questions, to find out what had brought the man here.

"The man needs rest," Delrael said to the other characters. "He's had a long and terrible journey. We'll find a place for him to stay. He can talk to us tomorrow."

"No!" the man said, coughing. He scowled at the cider, then took another drink. "I came this far. I can tell my story. You need to know what's happened."

Delrael dropped his voice and tried to sound gentle. "All right then, tell us your name."

The Tairan blinked, as if unable to understand the relevance of the question. He held one hand out to the fire and visibly began to let exhaustion take hold.

"I am Jathen. You ― " And then a flash shot across the stranger's face. He turned so quickly that some of his cider sloshed out of the mug. "
Delrael!
" he said in an inhuman whisper that sent shudders down Delrael's spine.

Delrael remembered all of the Tairans, massing toward him under the direction of Scartaris, ready to tear him and his companions apart with their mob frenzy. In a unison hissing voice they had all screamed his name,
Delrael!

Jathen must have been among them.

The Tairan man's expression fell. "We didn't mean to do that. None of us could help it. Now I can't help remembering."

"It's all right," Delrael said. "We know what Scartaris did to you. What happened to your city beyond what we've already seen?"

Jathen glanced up with lost eyes. "As if that wasn't terrible enough." He shook his head.

"It happened just before dawn a few weeks ago. Scartaris was like a terrible nightmare, and we sleepwalked through it all. But then, all of a sudden, Scartaris vanished from our minds. He was gone, destroyed somehow. We in Taire were free to face the horror of what we had done, what we had nearly helped him accomplish.

"We were stunned, but we managed to count our losses, learn exactly who had been killed ― " He paused, stumbling over his words, and forced himself to continue. "We learned who
we
had killed.

"Then, we searched for Enrod, who had helped us build Taire and resurrect it from the desolation. Enrod had been our strength, our guiding force, a true visionary with the best intentions for all human characters. But Enrod had left us. We couldn't understand what happened."

Jathen stared around at the faces, as if searching for some explanation. Vailret cleared his throat and turned his gaze away as he answered. "Scartaris twisted Enrod's mind as well. The Deathspirits trapped him on the Barrier River and sentenced him to take his raft back and forth for the rest of the Game."

Jathen hung his head. "Enrod deserved better than that after all the good he did."

Delrael sighed. "The Deathspirits did not seem willing to negotiate." The bonfire continued to crackle and slump as some of the burning logs collapsed into ashes.

Jathen remained silent, digesting the news about Enrod. Finally, he picked up his story. "We Tairans met with each other. We walked the streets. We looked at our city and saw all the frescoes, the statues, everything we had built. We saw the dried fountains, the gutters, the brittle plants. We went outside the walls and saw our dead crops.