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We stood there, Messenger, Oriax, me, and the two screaming boys. Any pretense of playing the tough guy was gone from Pete, who wept and begged and bargained. Trent, too, was undone, no longer cursing, just staring in awe at what had been done, and trembling.
“The game is this,” said the Master of the Game. “You will climb down this tower of stone. The one who touches the ground first, is free. The other will be judged to have lost.”
I saw desperate cunning flash in Pete’s eyes. He was smaller and nimbler than Trent. Trent was powerful but not quick.
Pete thought he could win. Trent, for his part, feared that Pete was right.
I looked over the edge. I am no great judge of distance, but the tower was at the very least thirty stories tall, with sides that were a barnacle-like encrustation of wild knobs and points, crevices and overhangs. Climbing down from this height would be hard and nerve-wracking. Particularly for two boys who already shook from fear and disorientation.
“Begin.”
They each ran to the edge, and each looked down as if trying to find an easy path. I doubted there was an easy path, only difficult and deadly ones. But as I’d expected, Pete was the first to sit, roll onto his belly, and stick his legs out in search of a toehold.
Trent was five or six feet to Pete’s right as he, too, began his descent.
“This is trickery,” Oriax muttered, and stared daggers at Messenger.
“I do not meddle in your domain, Oriax, stay out of mine.” I believe that was the harshest I’d ever heard him be toward Oriax. He despised her, that was a given. He was, without a doubt, her enemy, which I supposed made her mine as well. But he rarely spoke to her, and this warning had the impression of real teeth behind it.
Oriax fell silent.
There were rules in this universe, hard to define, but real; rules that limited his role and hers as well. I wondered who enforced those rules and how it was done. I wondered what punishment could be inflicted on creatures who, after all, could move easily through space and time.
No time to consider that in any detail. For now there was only watching the descent of the two boys.
Pete had gotten out to a lead and there was no pretense on the part of either boy that this was anything but a race. I could see Trent’s hands gripping an outcropping of the rock. There was already a red smear on his fingertips.
I knelt to feel the volcanic rock and was surprised at how sharp it was. I had of course seen pictures of lava fields in places like Hawaii, but I had never touched the pockmarked dark stone that seemed almost like a fossil of what had been liquid, burning stone. It reminded me of the fireworks snakes children light on the Fourth of July. But instead of ash it was an endless Swiss cheese of knife edges.
And it was down this treacherous surface that the two boys now raced, gasping, crying out in pain as soft flesh met stone, as muscle strained against gravity, as terror and the anticipation of worse to come stole their breath, robbed their hearts of vitality, and weakened their muscles.
I could see ripples of heat rising from the rocks lower down and wondered how they would possibly hold on. I wondered if this game was unwinnable. Did the Master of the Game play fair? Even if he did not, I was not going to call him out on it. I dreaded the day when it would be me, and not Messenger, who dealt with the dread creature.
They were only a quarter of the way down the rock face when it became clear that Pete would win and Trent lose—clear to Trent at least. So now he began to move crab-like across the surface of the tower, drifting sideways to be directly above his nimbler friend.
A rock came loose in Trent’s hand and for a heart-stopping moment he swung out from the surface, hand w
aving wildly and holding a rock half the size of his head. But his strength came into play as he strained the muscles of his right arm to lever his body back to hug the vertical face. He still held the rock that had come loose.
Trent looked down, and saw his friend’s head perhaps ten feet below him. He did not simply release the rock in his hand, he threw it.
Was he aiming at Pete’s head? I thought so. But he missed his head and instead the rock smashed onto Pete’s grasping fingers.
“Ahhh! Hey! Hey!” Pete yelled.
Trent did not even pretend to apologize. Instead he reached far down with his left leg to find a tenuous foothold, then with a left hand grab, a right hand grab, and a scraping of his chest that shredded his T-shirt and left a smear of red, he halved the distance between his feet and Pete’s head.
“No fair!” Pete yelled. “He’s trying to knock me down!”
Oriax let loose a disgusted laugh. She at least could guess—as I, too, had come to expect—what was coming. She had seen the trickery obscured by the Game Master’s bland words.
“Trent, damn it! You’re supposed to be my friend!”
Trent stomped straight down on Pete’s head. The blow barely connected, but it spurred Pete to action. He now saw the way his erstwhile friend intended to win the race. He saw that Trent meant to kill him if necessary.
Down Pete scrambled and down came Trent. Pete’s wounded hand was slicked with blood and he missed his grip, wobbled precariously, found his balance, only to take the toe of Trent’s boot straight in the side of his head.
In vain Pete cried out.
