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Rognoth looked down at Delrael, then craned his neck forward to push his monstrous head close to the man's face. Delrael stood firm.
The other fighters rushed out, saw their commander face-to-face with the dragon, and backed up. Many drew their bows; others held swords and spears, but didn't know what to do.
Delrael felt the thick stench of the dragon's breath pouring over him. Rognoth blinked his eyes again and reared back, as if finally recognizing him. "Delroth! Haw! Now I kill you!" he roared in a very good approximation of Gairoth's voice.
Delrael thought at that moment that he was doomed, that Rognoth carried the ogre's grudge as well. Gairoth had followed Delrael across the entire map, trying to catch him, and had finally died on the threshold of Scartaris. Now Rognoth would finish the job.
The dragon shook his enormous head and spat-sputtered flame and smoke into the air. "Stupid Gairoth! Haw! Haw! Hope I never see him again!"
Delrael wanted to laugh with relief. "Gairoth will never come," he said. "We've taken care of him. We also took care of Tryos. They'll never bother you. They are all dead. You're safe."
Rognoth flapped his wings and made a rumbling sound in his throat that sounded like a purr. "Then you are my friend, Delroth."
Delrael felt relief wash over him like warm bathwater. He called to all his gathered fighters to stand down and to sheathe their weapons. "It's all right now, it's all right!"
But later, when he went to Tareah's chambers to tell her the news, all he found was her note.
She had taken the Water Stone and left them.
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*Chapter 22*
TECHNOLOGICAL FRINGE
"I told you how Enrod turned his back on his Sorcerer heritage, but others have done far worse. I have even heard of one human city where all the characters have forsaken magic! How can this be? Without magic, Gamearth cannot function. All of these characters must be insane."
-- Sardun the Sentinel
Tareah stopped and stared at the enormous city of Sitnalta; though exhausted from her long journey, she ran forward. Its size amazed her.
Tareah had never before encountered such a large city so close. After growing up with only Sardun for company in the entire Ice Palace, she found it difficult to conceive of so many characters packed together in buildings. All the noise and activity overwhelmed her.
Entering Sitnalta, she strained her neck to gawk up at the tall buildings, down at the machinery puttering along the alleys. Her astonishment felt so unusual to her. These buildings and characters and clanking devices seemed as amazing to her as the grandest legends of old Sorcerer battles.
Sardun had warned her of this place. A terrible city, where the characters turned away from all magic, he said. But her father had told Tareah many things she now questioned.
Sardun had convinced her that Delrael, like the great Game heroes, was the type of character she should most admire. But though Tareah respected Delrael for what he could do, for his bravery and his drive to win ... she just didn't find him interesting enough for her. Vailret was the one who captured her attention; but she had never told him that. She wondered what he would have to tell her about his quest for the Earth Stone. She needed to find him first.
Vailret and Bryl had gone to Rokanun, but they had to pass through here first. She would ask about them in the city, find out when they had departed for the island. If Vailret and Bryl had already returned, then she would have to catch them on their way back to Delrael's army.
Somewhere a long distance away -- it seemed to be deep beneath her, shielded perhaps by rock -- Tareah could feel the tingling pull of the other Stones. The three remaining Stones together contained enough magic that she could sense it even here. The tingling grew stronger, and then vanished.
She couldn't understand it, but she did learn one heartening thing -- that the Air, Fire, and Earth Stones had indeed come together. Vailret and Bryl had succeeded in that much at least.
"Excuse me, please," Tareah said to a muscular woman in a grease-stained jumpsuit. The woman tinkered with some kind of monitoring box connected to pipes and tubes that ran under the streets. She looked up, distracted, and turned, finally setting her eyes on Tareah. She blinked. "Yes, what is it?" Tareah saw a smudge of dark oil across the weathered wrinkles on her cheeks.
"I'm looking for two companions. Their names are Vailret and Bryl -- Bryl is a magic-user, Vailret a scholar."
"Oh, I don't think I know them," the woman said and then frowned. "A magic user? In Sitnalta? My!" She bent back to her work and continued tinkering with the metal box.
Tareah caught the attention of another man who strode purposefully along. He wore dark clothes beneath a white lab smock. He didn't slow as she spoke to him, forcing her to turn and hurry along beside him.
" -- a magic user, old, and he wears a blue cloak. He's with a young man, blond hair."
The Sitnaltan man didn't turn to her as he hurried off. "No, neither of those sound familiar to me. Too much is happening in Sitnalta these days. I can't keep track of all the characters who come and go. I'm busy now. We don't have much time left."
He grabbed a door and walked inside a tall building with low ceilings. Tareah followed after him. Her multi-colored skirt swished as she moved. "What do you mean you don't have much time? Why won't anybody talk to me?"
The man paced down a corridor. On either side Tareah could see rooms and tables strewn with glass tubes and bottles, experiments cooking, complicated notations scrawled on chalkboards. In one room several men and women sat by a table, throwing dice and chalking scores on a board; by the grim feverishness on their faces, she could tell they didn't consider their efforts a game.
The man proceeded to the opposite side of the building, where a door led back out to the streets again. He shrugged out of his dirty lab coat, grabbed a clean one from a hamper, and pulled it on. He straightened his sleeves, then flashed a glance at her.
"The invisible force, of course. It controls a handful of characters at a time, and it knows how to cause excessive destruction. It seems random, chaotic. Despite concerted efforts of our greatest teams and our most brilliant solo inventors, we haven't found a way to stop it."
He stepped into the street. His black shoes slapped the steps.
"It used to happen four times a day, like clockwork. We charted it on a graph." He turned and made squiggling motions with his fingers against the brick wall.
Tareah didn't know what a graph was.
"But then two days ago it suddenly jumped to _six times_ a day. How are we supposed to resist that? We can't even understand what makes it work once. So -- " He stopped and slipped his hands into the wide pockets of his lab coat.
"I apologize for our attitude. Welcome to Sitnalta -- but perhaps you could come back some other time when we're not quite so busy? Hmmm?"
He turned and walked off again. This time Tareah didn't follow him.
_An invisible force_, Tareah thought. Controlling characters? Attacking Sitnalta? That made no sense. When the man had said the force struck four times a day, then suddenly increased to six times ... something clicked inside her head. She couldn't be sure what it meant.
While she stood pondering, Tareah leaned against a stone bench that ran along the side of the building. Scrawled in black and red markings on the smooth seat, she found nonsensical equations, numbers, and half-finished drawings of preposterous inventions. She imagined characters sitting there, doodling ideas while waiting for someone. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]