Anderson, Kevin J - Gamearth 01 (35 page)

Tarne and the other villagers in the forests might be able to retake the Stronghold.

Bryl had one spell left against Gairoth. He might make the Water Stone count
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if he could only identify the real ogre among the illusions. And Delrael had six arrows.

Ignoring the advancing ogres, Delrael shot down the line, one arrow after the other, using the skill he had absorbed from years of training. He struck four illusion Gairoths, watching the arrows pass through them to skid against the dirt of the training ground. Then the fifth arrow stuck in the ogre's shoulder.

"Oww!" Gairoth howled, and his illusory counterparts flickered.

Bryl's eyes lit up with a surge of last desperate power. The Water Stone bucked in his hand, and he threw it to the ground. He didn't even look to see if his roll had been successful.

A ball of pale lightning appeared in the air, glowing and bobbing as it moved across the distance. Gairoth tried to duck, but the ball lightning popped against him, singeing his hair and blistering his skin but causing no real harm. Bryl had rolled only a "2". The ogre shouted in pain.

Delrael's wrist flowed as he reached up to snatch an other arrow out of his quiver
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his last arrow. The oncoming ogres had hesitated for a second.

He needed to deprive Gairoth of the rest of his power.

Delrael shot the last arrow.

The point struck the heavy iron crown with a thunk. The crown dropped to the ground and bounced on the packed earth. The Air Stone popped out of its mounting, gleaming on the ground.

The mirrored Gairoths winked out of existence, leaving the one-eyed ogre standing alone. Gairoth roared with pain and surprise.

Delrael could do nothing more. He cringed, then balled his fists. He waited for the rest of the ogre army to plunge forward to beat him with dozens of clubs, to stab him with spears and swords....

"Come on then!" he said, wishing the tears would stop glinting in his eyes and blurring his vision.

The oncoming ogres faltered, wavered in the warm afternoon air, and dissolved into nonexistence.

Illusions, every one of them.

Bryl dived forward, landing on his chest and scrabbling for the fallen Air Stone. Gairoth lurched at him, trying to grab the diamond for himself. But the old half-Sorcerer's fingers touched the facets of the diamond first; he snatched it up, tossed it across the field
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and he vanished, surrounded in an illusion of invisibility. The Air Stone also winked out of sight.

Delrael blinked in surprise. Only a moment before, he and Bryl had been facing two dozen ogres and sixteen identical Gairoths. Now, in the entire Stronghold, he could see only himself and the one-eyed ogre. And Delrael had only a sword.

Gairoth turned red with anger and frustration. His burned skin, already peeling and cracking from being too long away from the swamps, looked blistered and painful. He swung his club blindly in the air, furious with the world, wanting to strike something, punish something, kill something.

He saw Delrael standing alone by the weapons store house.

"We won, Gairoth. Fair and square. You'd better leave now." Delrael crossed his arms for emphasis, trying to appear tough.

"Delroth!" Gairoth thundered forward, his eye blazing. He ran forward with his club. His bare feet kicked up the mulched wood shavings. "You be dead meat!"

Delrael had no time to duck inside the storehouse for even another dagger. He stood, wishing he could run, wishing he could just defend himself better. He was a
fighter
. But he could not use bare fists against Gairoth's battering-ram club.

Before the ogre could swing his club down on Delrael's head, another pounding came from outside the stockade wall just behind the weapons storehouse. The pounding reverberated in the air, and Gairoth stopped as a hoarse woman's voice shrieked his name. "Gairoth! You deserve a spanking, Gairoth!"

The ogre dropped the end of his club, letting it thump against the ground. His mouth hung open, dumbfounded. Delrael was afraid to make a move toward the storehouse.

"Gairoth! Do you hear me, boy?" the harsh female voice demanded.

"Maw?" the ogre asked quietly, astonished.

A crash struck the double-walled barrier, and Delrael stared as the upright logs shuddered with the strain. Another crunch, and the wall buckled inward. The logs splintered, and the cement-hard mud between them sifted down.

A huge female ogre flung the broken logs aside as if they were toothpicks and strode into the Stronghold. One hamlike hand rested on her hip and the other held a flat-ended club that looked like an oar for a warship.

She had lumpy eyebrows perched on a jutting forehead, and her skin looked as smooth as gravel. Each breast seemed fully as large as her head, and probably contained as much cerebral matter. Her hair was long and ropelike, tied with an incongruous pink ribbon that looked like centuries-old Sorcerer silk. Her buckteeth bit down on flabby lips.

"There you be!" She cracked the flat end of her club against one leathery palm. Her mouth was huge and yawning when she spoke, making "Maw" seem a terribly appropriate name. "You gonna get a whopping like you can't imagine! Look at you! Playing high and mighty in a"
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she spat the word -"
human
place like this! Now get on home!"

Gairoth bowed his head and shuffled toward the torn hole in the wall.

But his Maw stormed forward, threatening to crack him with her club. "What you be, an animal? Go out through the front door! And to think I raised you! Such a disgrace!"

Sheepishly, the ogre turned instead to the massive gates, which Delrael now saw had never been smashed down at all
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yet another facet of Gairoth's Air Stone illusion. The ogre glared at Delrael, but his Maw smacked him for the delay.

Delrael listened to their stomping footsteps diminish down the hill path. Then he realized he was in total silence, alone in the Stronghold.

Everything was over, finished, the final turns taken.

Bryl winked into visibility beside him, grinning so broadly his wispy beard protruded from his chin and his wrinkles folded into themselves. He seemed exhausted but delighted. He held the Water Stone and the Air Stone in his hands.

"I thought you were out of spells," Delrael said. "You used four."

Bryl smiled. "When I have
two
Stones, my spell allowance is determined by a different table in the Book. I get a bonus, five spells each day instead of four. Gairoth didn't know that."

Delrael chuckled and clapped a hand on the half Sorcerer's shoulder.

"Good thing Gairoth's Maw came at just the right time."

"Let's give credit where credit is due." Bryl held up the glittering diamond. He turned to look at the section of the Stronghold wall that the ogre woman had smashed. It stood intact, untouched.

"His 'Maw' will follow him most of the way back to the swamps, maybe even make him take a bath in the cesspools. She'll tell him to be good, because he can never know when she'll be watching."

Delrael saw Bryl's eyes glittering with delight. "Making illusions is easier than I thought."

Delrael looked down and saw that Gairoth's iron crown had also been false, just a twined circlet of straw. The attack had never been real, the ogre army had never been real. Ogres don't work together! It all gave him a headache.

"At least it's nice to feel completely safe again."

The arctic winds howled around the mountains, slicing like frozen knives. Tryos's ears ached. His body felt leaden and sluggish
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reptiles weren't made for cold such as this. Snow splattered against his eyelids, smearing his vision. He felt ready to fall from the skies out of sheer exhaustion.

After more than a full day of breathless pursuit, Rognoth had led him to this land of rocky outcroppings glazed with ice and jutting out of glacial debris. The little dragon had somehow eluded Tryos in the blasting snow and raging wind.

Through his numbed weariness, Tryos thought he caught a glimpse of the fat little dragon behind an ice-clad bluff. He surged forward, blasting his last few breaths of fire. The ice melted away, exposing only naked rock, not Rognoth. Perhaps he had escaped, perhaps he had never been there.

Rognoth was lost in the arctic cold and raging storms
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and good riddance to him! The larger dragon shook a coating of ice from his scales, freeing him of some excess weight. He had punished Rognoth once and for all -he'd never be naughty again.

Tryos wheeled around and glided southward again, toward the Stronghold.

As he traveled over the landscape, he viewed the terrain with a critical, admiring eye. No longer would he need to be content with a tiny island.

The dragon felt proud as he surveyed the land. His land.

*13*

Mountain of the Dragon

"Science and magic cannot coexist in the same area. Their Rules are contradictory: Science says you can't get something for nothing, magic says you can. We have to choose how we want to play the Game."

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Professor Frankenstein,
Published Notes
,

Selected Excerpts

Vailret leaned forward, squeezing his fingers against Dirac's polished drafting table. "It's been six days!"

He stopped himself from making a fist and smoothed out his voice.

"Please give us a boat or something. We have to try to rescue them."

"The time for waiting is past," Paenar said. "We must do something. We must make a difference!"

Dirac flinched from the stare of Paenar's new eyes. The two professors had designed a pair of goggles filled with exotic oils and floating lenses sandwiched between two wafers of transparent crystal. A wire connected the goggles to a small galvanic battery that had been surgically implanted at the base of Paenar's skull.

After the invention of the eyes and a simple operation, the blind man had turned around in awe, staring at the clutter of the professors' workroom, looking at every corner, every shape, every shadow. Paenar smiled, stretching his arms upward and ready to challenge the world. "Now I don't feel so helpless!"

But in Dirac's workroom Vailret felt the helplessness return. Many of the trappings of an inventor remained in Dirac's laboratory: the chalkboard, the drafting table, the scrawled equations waiting for answers. But everything was too ornate, and too clean, merely for show. The drafting table looked oddly like a desk, and the equations on the chalkboard appeared to have been there for a long time, unaltered. Vailret could not remember having seen chalkdust on Dirac's fingertips. Mayer had never mentioned how long it had been since her father's last invention.

"Your companions volunteered to be subjects in a scientific experiment." Dirac sat on a three-legged stool behind his drafting table. He folded his pudgy fingers together and rested his elbows on the table's clean surface.

"They were to test Professor Verne's balloon. Since six days have indeed passed, we can draw only two conclusions
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either the balloon failed and they have been killed in its crash into the sea ... or they reached the island of Rokanun, and Tryos the dragon has destroyed them. Either way, your friends are dead." He cracked his knuckles and sat up straight.

"I can imagine other scenarios," Paenar said.

Dirac smiled deprecatingly. "I suppose we cannot expect you to understand the Rule of Occam's Razor. You see, when more than one hypothesis fits the facts, the simplest solution must be the correct solution."

Dirac stood up from his stool; it creaked as he lifted himself. He picked up a piece of chalk and walked to the blackboard, studying his equations, but ended up writing a short reminder note to himself instead.

"There." He blew on his fingers to get rid of the chalkdust, then smiled at Professor Verne, who stood watching by the door. Verne had accompanied Vailret and Paenar, ostensibly to monitor the functioning of the blind man's mechanical eyes; Verne had known full well what the two men intended to ask. He made it clear, though, that he would not argue for or against them.

Paenar stood cold and motionless, as if he knew his presence made Dirac uncomfortable. "Give us a boat, and we will see for ourselves."

"You owe us that much," Vailret said. "Our friends risked their lives to test your invention."

"The Sitnaltans owe you no debt, young man. You have no contract, no written agreement that requires anything of us. You are our guest
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do we demand that you repay us for the food and shelter we have freely given? Do not insult me by making similar demands in return."

He rubbed his hands together and smiled at them again. "You are welcome to remain in Sitnalta. Perhaps in time you can be taught the rudiments of mathematics and make yourselves useful to the community."

"Oh, stuff your platitudes," Vailret snapped.

"Don't you understand?" Paenar gripped the sides of the drafting table, making Dirac take refuge behind it. "The Outsiders have already set the wheels in motion! They have thrown Scartaris here to grow and grow, sucking all the life from Gamearth! You can't just ignore this
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it won't go away!" He hung his head, but the anger returned to his face. "Apathy is the worst of all sins, and you are guilty of it!"