Gamearth

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Thilane snatched a few pine needles from an overhanging branch.

  "Sleep!" She crushed them in front of Delrael's face, letting him breathe the smell of the pine oil. "In sleep the dayid can help restore your wounded spirit."

  She watched the overpowering scent of evergreen engulf him. He melted back into a blissful sleep.

  Thilane stared at his unconscious form, scowling at her failure. She pressed her lips together, nodding in silence and knowing that the dayid approved of her decision. Drawing a deep breath to steady herself, she smelled the forest, the power, the vibrant life.

  I've never done this before. Only once in all our legends has it been successful. She padded over to a sturdy oak tree. The Healer placed her forehead against the tree and wrapped her arms around the wide trunk, pressing her chest against the rough bark.

  "Send Noldir Woodcarver to me," she said, and Ledaygen took her message.

  Thilane went back to Delrael again, watching him breathe, hovering over his leg. She waited.

  A khelebar man entered her enclosed room so silently that Thilane would not have heard him approach had she not felt the faint tremors of recognition in the dayid. She turned and met his questioning gaze.

  Noldir Woodcarver had black hair, unbraided and sheared off in a square mass around his shoulders. An intricate totem hung on his chest, representing a dream Ledaygen had sent him one night; only Noldir understood its symbolism.

  His arms were heavily muscled, but Thilane knew his hands were nimble and delicate.

  She nodded at Delrael lying on the wide stump. Noldir's eyebrows lifted, but he waited for her to speak. Thilane respected him for that. She had no patience for the others, like Ydaim Trailwalker, who marred the silence of the forest with useless talk.

  "The dayid says you must help this man."

  Noldir took a step backward, carefully sidestepping Thilane's flowers with his large feline paws. "I am always willing to offer my assistance..." He let the sentence hang, asking for more of an explanation.

  The Healer crossed her arms over her breasts. The spicy smell of the flower garland at her neck made her feel more relaxed, more confident.

  "His leg has died. The forest will take it, and the forest must give him a new one in exchange. You will fashion it ¯ from the wood of a kennok tree."

  Noldir Woodcarver bit back a gasp but recovered his composure. Thilane knew how powerful, how rare the kennok wood was, blessed by the dayid and containing many secrets. She was pleased to see how quickly Noldir grasped her intent.

  "Are you planning to repeat what was done with Jorig Falselimb? That was many years ago."

  "Yes. The khelebar do not remember how it was done. But I need to try.

  The dayid will assist me." Her eyes burned. She wanted to relax in a meadow, look out over the mountains, smell the flowers and trees. Not surround herself with so much pain.

  She drew in a deep breath and returned to Delrael's side. "Study the man's other limb and make a reproduction from living kennok wood. When will it be ready?"

  Noldir bent down, shying from the color and the smell of the man's blood. He inspected both the whole and the damaged leg. "No sooner than dusk, I think."

  "So long?"

  Noldir answered in a tone of voice that convinced her he was making no excuses. "His limb is strange. I have never attempted to carve such an object."

  She sighed and nodded.

  "I promise," he said. "By dusk."

  Thilane impatiently sent him away.

  Vailret slurped cold water from the pool, drinking until his teeth throbbed. He splashed the rest on his face, gasped from the chill, then drank again before shaking the wet clumps of straw-colored hair out of his eyes.

  It seemed mechanical to him, but he kept following the procedure by habit. He scooped up fine sand from the bottom of the pool and scrubbed himself. Afterward, his body ached but he felt clean at last, and very cold.

  "The water comes from underground springs beneath Ledaygen," Ydaim said. "You will find it refreshing. You may dry yourself by the fire before nightfall."

  Bryl shivered as he sat naked, waiting for his clothes to dry. His wrung-out blue cloak lay spread on a sun-warmed rock. His thin gray beard and wisps of hair sent drips of water down his neck.

  "Any word yet?" Vailret asked. "Is Delrael going to be all right?"

  The khelebar smiled blithely. "You can trust Thilane. She will do her best."

  He rubbed his hands together and looked from Vailret to Bryl to Vailret again. "Will you tell me where you are from? What is your home like?" The young man found the lush green of Ydaim's eyes disconcerting; the pupils were oval, catlike.

  "The Stronghold. It's far to the west from here, many hexes away."

  Vailret didn't feel like talking.

  "I have not heard of it," Ydaim said. His expression looked grave and serious.

  Vailret shrugged. Bryl coughed twice.

  Ydaim stretched out his supple feline body on the long grass beside the pool. "I would like to travel someday, but I do not wish to go far from the dayid. I have wandered the lands around Ledaygen more than any other khelebar. The others are content to do their appointed tasks for the forest.

  But I like to explore. And the dayid always takes me back home."

  Bryl finally made a rude noise. "I am getting tired of you constantly talking about your dayid."

  The khelebar rolled himself back into a sitting position and brushed a leaf from his shoulder. His face took on a baffled expression. "The dayid cares for us all. The dayid will offer its assistance to Thilane Healer as she strives to save your friend."

  Ydaim didn't seem to have any conception of what a dayid really was.

  Vailret considered telling him, but decided to hold those particular loaded dice for later. Instead, he pulled on his still-damp tunic and laced up the front. "So, does the dayid keep your forest so clean all by itself?"

  Ydaim spread his arms out to indicate all of Ledaygen. "This is the forest of the khelebar. We keep it clean because that is our covenant with the dayid. We live in peace with Ledaygen. All life is our friend, and we hold it sacred."

  The khelebar fingered the pine cone pendant on his chest.

  To Vailret, though, the words sounded flat and memorized. Flashing across his memories, he continued to see the monstrous Cyclops heaving boulders, the obsidian claws scraping sparks against the stone, the boulder smashing Delrael's leg as he tried to twist himself out of the way....

  The Outsiders would consider this just an incidental adventure along the path of their quest.

  He looked down and saw that his hands had clenched into fists.

  "And how did the khelebar get this miraculous covenant that forces you to hold life so sacred that you can't even strike back at a monster who attacked us? Some say the Outsiders put the monsters on Gamearth just to kill and be killed."

  Ydaim ignored the sarcasm in Vailret's voice. "That is exactly why we must not kill the Cyclops. We must bend and twist the Outsiders' Rules in whatever way we can. We need to show them that we own our lives and that we will do what we wish."

  Ydaim withdrew his long wooden sword and held it in front of his chest.

  The late afternoon light made the blade's hardened pitch coating look deeply golden. Splotches of the Cyclops's blood speckled the flat surface. Ydaim sounded embarrassed when he spoke again.

  "Long ago, just after the old Sorcerer wars, the khelebar were violent and warlike. We had no respect for nature. We ... mistreated the forest. We chopped down trees, letting them crash wherever they happened to fall, maiming the forest. Often we left the hewn trees to rot on the forest floor, useless!"

  Ydaim shuddered. "But the force of the dayid was strong in Ledaygen.

  The trees banded together and the forest retaliated against us. The trees ceased to bear fruit. The wood refused to burn. The branches tangled together and the trunks moved so close that we could not pass among them. The trees shifted their positions regularly, ma
king all the trails disappear. The khelebar sensed that the forest was their enemy, and so my ancestors fought back, chopping down trees and salting the soil. But the trees fell backward, on purpose, crushing the khelebar."

  Vailret looked around, wishing he had some way to write down the legend. He wanted to remember it for his chronicle of Gamearth. Ydaim seemed lost in his words.

  "Many trees and khelebar died before the dayid finally spoke through Thessar, the Father Pine. You saw Thessar when we first reached the council clearing, on the verge of the great cliff."

  Vailret nodded.

  "Thessar spoke aloud the terms of the dayid's truce. The khelebar are charged with keeping Ledaygen free of decay and sickness, free of parasites and any animals that might injure the trees. We must remove dead branches wherever they may be and see to it that seedlings grow far enough apart.

  Ledaygen thrives. In exchange, the forest taught us true wood-magic and how to heal, using arts previously known only to the dayid."

  Vailret finished pulling on his clothes and shook his arms. "Then you should have no trouble at all healing Delrael."

  Ydaim smiled mysteriously. "That we shall see."

  Fire. Sparkling orange, burning bright. Warm fire, hungry fire, reflecting from the glassy yellow of a single staring eye.

  The Cyclops stood at the edge of the forest, drawing the smoke into his nostrils. Feeling powerful. The trees were afraid of him, afraid of the fire.

  He scraped his fingers together, and more sparks flew.

  The khelebar had spread a thick carpet of dried leaves on the floor of Ledaygen. The flames grew.

  Sparkling orange, burning bright.

  "I have finished my carving, Healer." Noldir Woodcarver pushed his way through the dense trees into Thilane's chamber.

  She looked up at him, groggy and blinking her eyes as she broke her preparatory meditation. She waited a moment, gathering her thoughts as the trees around her flickered into focus.

  "Help me, Woodcarver. I must take the man to the kennok tree." The words scraped out of her vocal cords, sounding harsh.

  Noldir slipped his fingers under Delrael's shoulders, shifting the man to get a better grip. Delrael let out a soft, pain-filled gasp, and Noldir almost dropped him. Delrael's bleeding had stopped, but he still looked weak and drained, fluttering along the hex-line between life and death. Thilane encouraged Noldir, though, and he lifted the man onto her dusty gray back.

  The Healer held him in place with one arm as they set off through the uncharted ways of Ledaygen. Noldir kept pace beside her, watching and helping hold the man. Thilane could feel Delrael's weight on her back, she could feel his blood on her fur, she could feel echoes of his pain throbbing in her head.

  She wanted to drench herself in Ledaygen's cold spring waters when the ritual was finished, lay in the numbing pool until she could feel cleansed.

  But she had to succeed first ¯ the dayid held this man in high esteem, enough to ask her for this sacrifice. The risk. The dayid's demands were not easy, but the chance to work directly with the soul of the forest outweighed everything else.

  Noldir led the way to where the lone kennok tree grew. The trees were so rare and precious that few of the khelebar knew their location.

  The Woodcarver passed through a thicket of flowers and woven vines to a place where he had left wood chips strewn on the forest floor. Thilane noticed that, in his work, he had heedlessly trampled the grass around the tree.

  Then she studied the new limb itself.

  Noldir had joined himself to the dayid, working with the wood of the small but ancient trunk of the kennok. He had shaped the wood like clay with the palms of his hands, stroking off the bark and smoothing, bending, reshaping according to the picture in his mind. The roots of the kennok tree still plunged deep into the soil of Ledaygen, tapping into the blood of the dayid itself. But the main part of the trunk was now in the shape of a human leg, poised erect and pointing its toes toward the sky. The golden polished wood glowed with rich coppery whorls of grain, strong but soft, and still alive.

  Thilane set her mouth in a satisfied line. She tossed her braids back over her shoulders, where they brushed against the injured man. "I commend you, Woodcarver. Your work honors the dayid."

  Noldir shrugged but looked pleased, as if he had not expected her to give any kind of compliment. "The dayid gives each of us our special talents."

  He brushed some of the wood chips from an area of grass. Thilane knelt, and the two of them slid Delrael's body from her back, laying him beside the kennok trunk. Noldir tried to make Delrael more comfortable while Thilane stood back, stretching her shoulders and brushing at her fur in distaste. She looked at the sticky red on her fingers.

  "He must wake now, just for a moment."

  She plucked one yellow petal from the garland of flowers around her neck and crushed it in front of Delrael's nose. Noldir stepped back from the acrid odor that sent the man plunging back into consciousness.

  Thilane watched Delrael blink. His glassy eyes were strange and gray, different from the emerald green shared by all khelebar. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. She bent down, stroking his hair. He would not know who she was.

  Delrael looked startled, and then his face drained back into gray as pain washed over him. Thilane turned his head, directing his gaze to the wooden leg growing up out of the tree stump.

  "Behold your new limb, Traveler. Because my own skill was not enough, Ledaygen has offered you a replacement."

  Delrael tilted his head, but then he saw the clotted blood that slicked his leather armor, the bone shards protruding from the remains of his leg.

  Thilane caught and cradled his head as he swooned back against her.

  "Sleep now," she said.

  Delrael's eyes closed and he breathed deeply as she whispered him back into unconsciousness.

  Thilane glanced up at Noldir Woodcarver. He seemed to be struggling to contain an expression of awe and to retain the composure he thought she expected of him.

  Then she ignored the Woodcarver as she ran her fingers along the cloth of Delrael's stained and torn trousers, finding the secret of the foreign fibers in the cloth. They fell away, leaving both of his legs bare.

  Thilane drew a deep breath and exhaled as she closed her eyes, humming to herself, floating into the trance she would need. Keeping her eyes closed, she extended an arm to grasp the kennok wood reaching out of the ground.

  From it she drew strength and deepened her trance.

  With her mind she searched for the dayid, plunging deep beneath the soil of Ledaygen, following the network of kennok roots toward the heart of Gamearth itself. She saw the structure, the patterns ... she learned with awe how the dayid slipped between the cracks, bent under and around the Rules that confined the rest of the world. Still shutting her eyes tight, she could see through the eyes of the forest.

  Her hand drifted down the polished kennok wood until she reached the point where the carving ended and the bark began. Thilane extended her index finger and applied gentle pressure horizontally, slicing the artificial leg from the kennok tree.

  Eyes closed, she lifted the heavy false limb and carried it on her fingertips until she rested it on the ground beside Delrael's injured leg. She aligned the two limbs, then climbed back to her feet again. On four feline paws, she padded to one of the towering black pines, then ran the palms of her hands up the trunk, brushing the bark, the rough lumps of pitch, until she encountered a branch thinner than her finger. She plucked it from the trunk, leaving no scar.

  Noldir watched in awed silence. He saw that dark red sap had begun to ooze from the severed trunk of the kennok tree.

  The Healer's humming grew louder. Then she sang a song with no words, notes that sounded like running water, chattering birds, blooming flowers.

  Thilane laid the thin pine branch across Delrael's thigh, just above his injury.

  Her breath hissed through her teeth as she pushed down. She did not hear Noldir gasp as
the branch sank into Delrael's flesh, melting through the heavy bone and severing the leg.

  Moving rapidly now, Thilane opened her eyes. The green irises glowed with an unseeing power. She discarded Delrael's dead limb and switched it for the living kennok leg, pressing it against his stump before the blood could start. The Healer wrapped her fingers along the seam, and her voice broke into a different, more powerful song that resonated in the air. The trees seemed to be singing along with her.

  "Melding of flesh and tree. Merging of bone and wood. Joining of sap and blood. Bring the two together as one. Life of tree and man blend together.

  Meld. Merge. Join. One!"

  A flood of energy from the dayid seared through her nerves, leaping across the barrier into the kennok wood.

  The Healer gave a sharp cry and stepped back, blinking her eyes and seeing the forest again. Her hands trembled with exhaustion. Noldir Woodcarver stood beside her as she fought to bring her mind back through the murk of the trance. Noldir reached out a hand to steady her, but she pushed him away and bent over Delrael's motionless form.

  She had attached the kennok limb. A sharp line marked the boundary of skin and wood, but that would fade as the man's body accepted his new leg. She smiled to herself.

  Only a small amount of the man's blood spattered the grass. She ran her fingers along one of the grass blades, straightening it and wiping off the red smear.

  Thilane gave the crushed, dead leg to Noldir. "Take this ... and bury it."

  Delrael fled from bizarre dreams, unable to force himself awake.

  Something held him imprisoned with his nightmares, but locked him away from his pain. He saw a giant, one-eyed monster hurling boulders. He remembered running. Hybrid man-panthers. The huge rock flying at him. And pain. A great deal of pain.

  "Roll the dice again!" He moaned and turned his head. He had better luck than this. "It's not fair." His leg felt very strange.

  He lifted his eyelids, expecting to see something or someone he recognized. He didn't. He was in a thick forest somewhere. He could smell it.

  He could hear the sounds of wind and night birds. Everything seemed to be dark, but he was not cold. In a disorienting moment, he wondered if he had somehow landed in the Rulewoman Melanie's forest, by her Pool of Peace. He expected to see his own father there, waiting for him.