“You think you’ll escape me?” the thing said. There was something particularly horrible about watching that human face speak human words atop the body of a monster. He had a thick Russian accent, like Kurodar’s own. “They all thought they’d escape me! But they all fell into my prison eventually and into my hands. Look around, boy! There is no place for you to run!”
With that, the creature let out another great roar, its face tilted toward the starry nothingness. Breathed fire blotted out even the color of the dark. It spread its slithery tentacles out on all sides like the arms of a flattened spider. And its front—disgustingly—opened. And it released smaller monsters from within its belly.
Boars and Harpies and Cobras—they rushed and slithered and flew at Rick across the rocky arena. His sword was in his hand and with the armor giving him speed and strength, he flashed from place to place, swinging the blade and cutting the creatures down. Harpies fell from the sky and died. Boars reeled back, cut in half. Cobras shattered, their white bones flying . . .
But while Rick was distracted with the melee, the enormous King of the Dead thundered at him again, the pound of its huge feet making the round platform quake.
The beast reached him . . . towered over him . . . whipped its gigantic sword at his midsection. Rick had just dispatched the final Boar in quick combat, and only the power he got from Mariel’s armor gave him the speed he needed to duck the King’s giant blade. He felt the great wind of it as it passed over his head. Then he straightened—and struck back. He flashed straight at the King of the Dead, bringing his sword back with both hands and swinging it around like a baseball bat. Tall as Rick was, his head only came up to the monster’s knee. Mariel’s blade sank into the scaly calf of the beast. It roared fire and slapped at Rick with a slithery arm.
The blow caught Rick on the side of the head and sent him flying. He landed hard on the rock surface, dazed. The transparent head of Kurodar—the interface—rose up above him. Did he have time to attack it while the King of the Dead was hobbled by his wound?
He glanced away from the interface and toward the beast. He saw the place where his blade had sunk into the King of the Dead’s leg. There was a gash there, bleeding green goo, and the King was still roaring in pain. But even as Rick looked at it, the wound began to mend itself. In a second, it was completely gone. The King was healed and whole again and ready to renew his attack.
No time to attack the interface. He had to stop the King of the Dead first.
Rick pushed up to his feet, breathing hard. He could feel Mariel’s armor bleeding strength into him through the pores of his skin, but it couldn’t save him forever. He was growing tired already and would soon grow more tired still. And the King . . . he had so much power! Too much! He could heal himself. He could create monsters of his own. He was ten times Rick’s size and a hundred times more powerful. Rick’s armor was strong and his sword was sharp, but he needed some other power to defeat this thing.
You hold the truth inside you. The truth is your greatest weapon.
What truth? he wondered. But there was no time to find the answer now. With a fiery roar, the King of the Dead opened himself once again and set another army of creatures at him—and flew into the air and attacked Rick at the same time.
Rick flashed away, the Boars and Harpies and Cobras coming after him, the King of the Dead shaking the stony platform so hard, it nearly knocked Rick over. For the next several minutes, there was nothing in Rick’s mind but the swing of his sword and the flash of his movements. Only when all the smaller creatures were dead and he confronted the King face-to-face again could he begin to try to think this through.
The wall of cloud was at his back, and the King of the Dead stood before him.
You must learn what Kurodar does not know, Baba Yaga had told him. You must face the horror he cannot face.
This place—this MindWar Realm—was so full of horror, Rick hardly knew where to begin. But while he had been fighting, it seemed, his mind had been working on the problem unconsciously. And now, as the King of the Dead ground its teeth and roared more fire and spread its wings ready to fly at him again, images and ideas flashed through Rick’s brain faster than he could understand them.
The Realm was made from Kurodar’s imagination. He created most of it purposefully. But here in the Golden City, some things seemed to have come to life spontaneously whether Kurodar wanted them to or not.
Even I’m his creature, poor soul that I am, Baba Yaga had said. But he can’t touch me. He can’t make me leave, much as he may want to.
So some parts of Kurodar’s imagination were beyond his own control. He had made this great beast, the King of the Dead, on purpose . . .
In the image of his father!
The thought came into Rick’s mind suddenly and he knew it was true. He remembered that vision Baba Yaga had given him. All the dead of the Soviet Union, the murdered dissenters who did not want the fake paradise that was being forced upon them.
They all thought they’d escape me! But they all fell into my prison eventually and into my hands.
That was the King of the Dead speaking, but he was speaking in the voice of Kurodar’s brutal father, the agent of the KGB. A man who had murdered so many. A man so hated by the people that when the Soviet Union fell, a mob had beaten him to death, right in front of his son . . .
In the same flash in which he remembered this, Rick remembered his own anger against his father when he thought his dad had betrayed his family, before he understood that his father had made, instead, the impossible choice of sacrifice, the impossible sacrifice of love.
But what if that had not been his dad? What if his dad had been a monster like this? What if his dad had had no God to teach him that sacrificial love but had known only the god of his own power? How hard it would have been then for Rick to find his trust again. . . . to rebuild his lost boy-faith into the faith of a man. His dad’s love . . . his mom’s love. . . Raider’s love . . . Molly’s . . . It had all been God’s love and had brought God’s love to him—that was the love that now surrounded him like Mariel’s armor and made him strong.
But what if there had been no love? What if he had been Kurodar?
The King of the Dead roared and the Realm’s black sky was lit by fire. It spread its demon wings and whiplashed its octopus arms. It lashed its snake tail and pounded its dragon feet. And it charged at Rick where Rick stood pinned against the wall of cloud.
. . . the horror he can’t face . . .
“He was glad!” Rick shouted. “He was glad when they killed you! You filled his heart with hate and he hated you and he was glad!”
It was so strange. The words came out of him and they were only words, but he felt them fly from him like bullets. Because they were true. That was the horror Kurodar couldn’t face. He had turned his father into an evil god to keep from facing his hatred for him, to keep himself from knowing what he truly felt when he saw his father die.
Kurodar was glad. Kurodar had been taught nothing but humiliation and beating and hatred and he was full of hatred himself, and so he was glad when his father was mobbed and humiliated and beaten to death.
“He was glad when you died!” Rick shouted.
The King of the Dead stopped his charge midway. The great monster stood in the center of the rock arena and swayed on his feet and reeled in confusion.
Rick seized the moment and launched himself at the thing. He swung Mariel’s sword, and again the blade bit into the monster’s scales and the creature bled green goo.
This time, Rick was ready for the King’s counterattack. He ducked the sweeping tentacle and pulled the blade free and spun away.
But if he thought the battle was over, if he thought mere words would bring the giant down, he was wrong. As quickly as before, the King of the Dead healed. As quickly as before, he turned. He roared and there was fire, just as before. Nothing had changed.
Or
wait . . .
Rick stood now with the interface behind him and the King of the Dead between him and the wall of fog. The monster was facing him, just as huge and powerful as before. But something was different.
The wall. The fog. It was coming undone.
The towering storm-tossed wall of fog was unfolding from its heights and rolling down and growing smaller and thinning to mere mist as it fell. Something in Rick’s words had broken through the miasma and begun to clear it away.
Rick did not have time to wonder what this could mean, or how it might help him, because the King of the Dead had spread its wings and tentacles again, and the smaller monsters were already crawling out of its belly ready to attack.
Rick braced himself for the onslaught, his sword in his two hands. And as he did, the wall of cloud unraveled completely and dissolved to drifting tendrils of white smoke and was gone. The air was clear.
It was like a dam bursting. The moment the cloud wall fell, a powerful rush of silver water and blue light came pouring into the dark that surrounded the arena. The next moment, even before the fresh spate of Boars and Harpies and Cobras could launch at him over the rocky surface, Mariel and Favian were there. Mariel rose up out of the silver flow that rushed into the rocks, and Favian burst like an angel from the powerful blue beam that pierced the darkness.
The water spirit was on the King of the Dead’s left and the blue sprite was to the right of him. The King of the Dead turned one way and the other in surprise and rage.
The army of Boars and Harpies and Cobras rushed and flew and slithered over the arena toward Rick—but even as they charged, Mariel threw out both her arms at once and unleashed a powerful flood of shining mercurial water. It washed over the entire stampeding army and in the next second they were carried away. They were gone.
The King of the Dead let out one last shrieking cry and spread its wings and rose up off the platform into the air.
But now Favian threw out his hands and blue light shot from his palms to form a barrier. The King flew at it, struck it, and, giant though he was, fell back. The arena shook as the monster dropped down onto it. And now Mariel turned her power on him, and surrounded him with silver water, hemming him into the small circle at its center.
“The interface, Rick!” she cried out.
And at the sound of that almost musical voice, Rick roused himself from his startled shock. He saw Mariel’s substance circling the beast. He saw Favian’s light barring its way.
He turned around. There, framed against the backdrop of starry emptiness, Kurodar’s twisted, pain-racked face hovered above him.
The thing was too big and insubstantial to attack with his sword alone. But now he remembered: that final power, the last upgrade, the blast he had unleashed in the church against the swarming armies of the dead . . .
He summoned the energy for that blast. He felt the charge mount within him, magnified somehow by Mariel’s armor. Soon he was full of the seething strength of his faith and spirit.
And in a single blinding explosion of light and power, he released it in a great flash at the interface . . .
“There they are!” shouted Chuck.
The Traveler and Professor Jameson and Miss Ferris looked at the screen to see the white figure that was Rick Dial become visible again. The blue figure of Favian was there, too, and the silver figure of Mariel.
Professor Jameson turned to look at where Molly lay on the cot, her hands folded on her chest, her eyes gazing emptily up at the ceiling.
“She’s broken through,” he murmured.
“And look!” said Miss Ferris.
They all turned to her and then followed her gaze and they all saw the big screen with the Battle Station on it, the sky weapon that Kurodar had seized.
“The energy bar. It’s not filling anymore,” Miss Ferris said.
“They’ve done it,” the Traveler murmured. He glanced at Professor Jameson, nodded toward Molly. “Take her off the box. She’s done enough. Bring her back.”
Professor Jameson nodded once and hurried to his daughter. Gently, he lifted the band off her forehead and unplugged it from the black box.
Molly went on staring another second. Then blinked once. Then looked at him. Then smiled radiantly.
The Traveler turned calmly back to his computer to finish programming the portal.
In the moments before Kurodar died, he didn’t feel surprised. It was really as if he’d always known who he was, what he was, and what he was trying to hide from himself. It was as if when Rick shouted out the truth inside his mind, he merely nodded and surrendered, all the will to power going out of him, because he knew all the power in the world wouldn’t save him from the awful fate of being himself.
Strapped to his chair and wired to his machine, the electricity that backed up into him when the interface was destroyed was really no more painful than the hatred that had seethed inside him all along, as if his veins were filled with acid or boiling water.
The native workers who had tended and fed him out of fear this whole long time ran for their lives screaming as the machinery that generated the Realm began to rock and smoke in the moments before it exploded.
But Kurodar didn’t move. He couldn’t, attached to the mechanism as he was, part of the mechanism as he was. He just sat there and waited for the final blast.
And in the end, he died weeping.
After he struck the deathblow, Rick watched the face of Kurodar come raining down out of the black sky in points of twinkling light. It was almost beautiful, though he knew it heralded destruction. He turned around and his eyes locked with the eyes of the King of the Dead. For another moment, the great beast struggled and writhed, trapped within Mariel’s silver circle of water and barred by Favian’s rays of blue light. For another moment, its eyes, the eyes of Kurodar in the face of his father, burned with hatred and with rage.
But the next moment, Rick saw the fire of that hatred go out, and he knew that Kurodar was finished.
The King of the Dead threw back its human head and roared in agony. Its dragon body twisted and its demon wings crumbled to red ash. It shuddered once and then its whole body erupted into flame. Rick could see the smaller monsters—the Boars and Harpies and Cobras—burning to ashes inside it.
In seconds, the fire consumed the monster and the King of the Dead rained down out of the air in a black storm of ashes. Even before those ashes settled to the rock circle of the arena, the night around them began to quake.
Rick knew what would happen before it happened and then he saw it begin. The graveyard in the distance and the Golden City beyond it began to accordion together, collapsing in on themselves and all of it rushing toward him, toward the blackness that was going to consume it all.
The MindWar Realm was dying, all of it, falling into the emptiness that surrounded it, becoming nothing as Kurodar died.
Rick looked at Mariel, who hung silver in the air above him. He looked at Favian, who floated just above the arena. The three of them exchanged glances as the Realm collapsed around them, knowing the falling world would take them with it into the darkness, that they had only a minute left to live, if that.
Then, as they gazed their good-byes at one another, the portal opened in the middle of them: a floating diamond of purple light.
Rick was surprised by the depth of his sadness at the sight of it. He knew he had to go through—his life lay that way. But the thought of leaving Mariel behind here, losing her forever, made him hesitate even so.
Mariel inclined her head toward him. “Go on,” she said.
Favian cried out in a simple anguish of sorrow: “Mariel! You said you’d come.”
She shook her head. She gave a small, sad smile. “I said that Rick and I will be together and we will be. Don’t be afraid. Nothing that truly lives in me will ever die. Go home and you’ll find me there.”
The Golden City crumbled and the ruins of it
rushed toward them where they stood surrounded by blackness. A great wind of destruction began to wash over them.
Rick stepped toward the portal.
“Favian,” he said.
Favian shook his head no, but all the same, he began moving too.
They both stepped to the portal. They both kept their eyes on Mariel hovering above them. The MindWar Realm came collapsing in on them. The blackness folded over them.
The last sight Rick had of Mariel was her smiling at him: a sad smile of good-bye.
Then he stepped through the portal as the world came tumbling down around him.
EPILOGUE:
GAME OVER
WHEN RICK OPENED his eyes, he was alone in his bedroom. He blinked up at the ceiling, confused.
Was it just another dream? he wondered. Was it all a dream from the beginning?
He swung his legs off the bed to the floor, and the ache that went through them reminded him: No, some of it was real, at least. Some of it was all too real.
He moved to the window. He pulled back the curtains. He looked out.
A heavy snow was falling on the MindWar compound. The ground and the rooftops were already carpeted with white and so was the forest beyond the fence. It almost managed to make the place look pleasant.
Almost Christmas, Rick thought.
Through the swirling flakes, Rick could see the guards clustered around the gate. He could see the fence was damaged from where Molly’s truck had hit it when she tried to escape. He could see the tower where the Boar had broken through the Breach and killed the guard. The thought made him touch the side of his forehead. He checked his mind. The portal inside him was gone. Kurodar was gone.
It wasn’t a dream. It all happened, he thought. It was all real.
His mind flashed back to the end of it: the stone arena in the midst of space, the gigantic King of the Dead, the cloud wall collapsing at the sound of his voice, Favian, Mariel . . .
Game Over Page 20
