He chopped down at that neck, two hands on his axe. This time he cut a deep gash. The head whipped back, catching Stile in a sideswipe and hurling him against the wall.
He saw a flash of light as his head struck, then slid down the curve of the wall. His head was spinning. He retained the Flute—but hardly had the wit to use it. He had not been knocked out, but had been badly shaken up by the blow.
Now the head was orienting on him. The circular array of teeth widened to take him in, and the breath steamed up the vicinity so that Stile could hardly see.
He scrambled away on hands and knees. He wasn’t sure he could make it to his feet, or stay on them if he did. He had been in a boxing match once in the Game and been tagged by a solid blow so that his knees went rubbery; he felt similar now. Only there would be no time between rounds to recover! The snout followed him—then paused, grinding out a puff of smoke.
Neysa had rammed her horn into the other side of the Worm’s neck, beside the first hole. She lacked the enchantment of the Flute, but a unicorn’s horn was itself magical, and a weapon no creature could ignore.
The Worm reacted automatically, turning on this annoyance. It was not terrifically smart.
Stile scrambled to his feet. He swung the Platinum machete ferociously—machete? It had changed again!—chopping with all his strength at the Worm’s body. More blood gouted out, spilling over Stile’s two hands and spattering his front. He hated the burning, greasy feel of it, but kept hacking.
The dragon whipped its head back, but Stile lashed at the snout with his cleaver, just missing an eye. The head recoiled—and Stile returned to work on the neck. This was like chopping through a tree, except that it became a good deal softer and messier as he got past the vertebrae and into the fatty tissues. Now blood was flooding out so voluminously that Stile was wading in it, and every lift of his implement splattered it further. Blood ran down the shaft as he elevated it, and along his arms to the shoulders; it sprayed across his face. But his grip remained firm, thanks to the Flute’s enchantment. As long as he willed his grip to be good, it was. He was wallowing in gore—but still the Worm lived and thrashed, not yielding.
Finally the body was severed entirely. The neck and head fell on one side; the body writhed on the other. The job had been done. Stile had slain the dragon.
His thought of victory was premature. Still the thing didn’t die. Instead the cut ends frothed and solidified like sponge, and the bleeding abated. The head section crawled slowly by itself, while the body section cast about blindly, looking for its opponent.
This was a worm. It was possible to cut a worm in half—and both halves would form new worms. Stile had not really accomplished anything yet.
Well, yes—he had made some progress. The head no longer had the leverage to strike at him, and the body lacked sensory apparatus. In time these situations would be remedied—but right now he had a definite advantage. He had to go ahead and destroy the entire Worm right now, while he could.
This was what Pyreforge had meant about the need for a good swordsman with staying power. What a job!
Stile moved down the body, picking his spot, and resumed hacking with his machete-axe. Again the blood gouted; again the torso twisted in agony, trying futilely to fight or escape. The severed end came around, thinking it was a head; it smeared him with half-clotted blood, sickeningly, but could not bite him. Stile pressed on, feeling more like a butcher than a hero. In fantasy lore, the champion skewered the ferocious dragon one time and the beast collapsed cleanly. Here there was nothing neat or convenient or particularly noble about it; he was wallowing in foul-smelling gore, hacking apart a helpless mound of blubber. Hero? He wanted to vomit!
By the time he completed the second cut, his arms were tiring. But still each segment of the Worm remained alive. If he quit here, they would become three new, smaller dragons. He had to abolish the entire mess, somehow.
Then he had a dull inspiration. The dragon had countered his magic with its own magic. But now it lacked organization. Maybe magic would finish it, at this stage. It was certainly worth a try.
He brought the Flute to his mouth. It was festooned with gore. Stile’s gorge rose, and he decided to try his spell without playing on the instrument. “O monster fair,” he intoned with irony. “Convert to air.”
The segment before him shivered, resisting. Whether this was because of residual anti-magic in the dragon, or because Stile had not summoned sufficient magic, he was not sure. Then it melted and evaporated into a truly noisome cloud. The spell was working!
Stile devised spells to abolish the two remaining segments, then another to clean the gore from himself, Neysa, and the tunnel. He had done the job, and earned the right to borrow the Flute. Yet he was not especially pleased with himself. Wasn’t there some better way to settle differences than hacking apart ancient magical creatures? How would he feel if he were old, having some fresh young midget chop him down to size?
Yet if he had not performed, the Lady Blue’s situation could have become quite difficult. And it could still become so, if Stile did not locate and deal with the murderer of the Blue Adept before that murderer caught up with Stile himself.
Meanwhile, he wondered whether the Lady was winning her chess game with Pyreforge.
CHAPTER 5
Riddles
Sheen was pleased. “You’re here for a full week this time?”
“Until the Unolympic,” Stile agreed. “Neysa and the Lady Blue are relaxing after the excursion among the Little People, and I have considerable business here in Proton-frame, as long as my enemy doesn’t strike.” He shrugged. “Of course I’ll be staying longer in Phaze-frame one of these times, to run down my enemy there and look for the Foreordained. If I wash out of the Tourney I’ll spend the rest of my life there.”
“What was it like, being among the Little People?” Sheen asked. They were in their apartment, engaging in their usual occupation. Sheen was an extremely amorous female, and Stile’s frequent absences and uncertainty of future increased her ardor. And, since he had a balked romantic situation in Phaze—
“Strange,” he answered. “I felt like a giant, and I wasn’t used to it. This must be the way Hulk feels. I really am more satisfied with my size than I used to be.” He changed the subject. “Where is Hulk? Did you help him?”
“I believe so. I put him in touch with my friends. I assumed you would not have sent him if he could not be trusted.”
“He can be trusted.”
“I’m sure my friends required him to take the same oath you took, if they revealed themselves to him at all. They may simply have issued him an address. I did not inquire after him, because that would only expose him and them to possible Citizen attention, and we don’t want that.”
“True,” Stile agreed. “If the Citizens knew that some robots are self-willed—”
“You have something against self-willed robots?” she asked archly.
“You know, at times I almost forget that you yourself are a robot. I don’t see how you could be much better in the flesh.”
“All the same, I wish I were in the flesh,” she said sadly. “You can never truly love me. Even if you were to win the Tourney and become a Citizen and stay here the rest of your life, even if you didn’t have the Lady Blue in the other frame, you would never really be mine.”
Stile did not like this line of conjecture. “There is very little chance of my winning the Tourney. I barely survived my first Game.”
“I know. I watched. You were lucky.”
“Luck is a fickle mistress.”
She turned on him abruptly. “Promise me that if you ever give this mistress up permanently, you’ll have me junked, put out of consciousness. I don’t mean just reprogramming or deactivating me; destroy my computer brain. You know how to do it. Don’t let me suffer alone.”
“Sheen,” he protested. “I would never junk you!”
“I like Neysa, and I’m resigned to the Lady Blue. I know you’re sliding i
nto love with her, and in time she’ll love you, and there’s your true romance. But this is a different frame; she and I can never meet. Nothing you do there needs to affect what you do here—”
“I am of both frames now,” Stile said. “What affects me in one, affects me in the other. You know that if the Lady ever gives her love to me, I—we’ll still be friends, you and I, but—” He halted, hating this, but not constituted to conceal the truth.
“But not lovers,” she finished. “Even that I can accept. Neysa accepted it. But if you ever find you can dispense with that remaining friendship—”
“Never!”
“Then you will junk me cleanly. Promise.”
Stile suffered a vision of himself hacking apart the living Worm. That had been unclean dispatching. How much better it would have been if he could have banished that Worm to nonexistence with a single, painless spell. Sheen deserved at least that much. “I promise,” he said. “But that time will never—”
“Now it’s time to get you back to the Tourney,” she said briskly.
Stile had been near the head of the line for matching-up before; this time he was near the end. That meant he could play this time, and have another Game soon. The later Rounds would suffer less delay, as the number of remaining contestants declined. The double-elimination system did not eliminate half the contestants each Round, but by Round Four it would approximate fifty percent attrition, and by Round Eight it would be down to about sixty-four survivors, and the prizes would begin. That was his minimum objective, to reach Round Eight. Because that meant he would get another chance, even if he washed out of the Tourney thereafter. In that sense these first few Games were the most critical. Since they were also likely to be against the least competent players—with certain notable exceptions!—this was the time to avoid making any foolish errors. There was absolutely no sense in throwing away a Game that could be easily won by being careful.
His second Game was against an older woman, a serf. She was unlikely to be any match for him. She would probably go for CHANCE; it was the obvious ploy against a superior player.
The grid gave her the opportunity; she had the numbered facet. Well, there were ways to reduce the pseudo-equality of chance, and Stile played for them. He selected TOOL.
Sure enough, it came up 3B, TOOL-assisted CHANCE. The subgrid appeared. Stile played to avoid the pure-chance complexes like Dice or Roulette, in favor of the semi-chance ones like Cards. It came up Dominoes.
All right. Stile managed to steer it into the 91 piece, 12 spot domino variation, while the woman put it into the conventional “Draw” game. Stile, familiar with all variants, had wanted one unfamiliar to his opponent to confuse her; he was halfway there.
They adjourned to a Gamesroom and played. They laid all the dominoes facedown, shuffled, and each drew one from the boneyard. Stile drew the 6:7; the woman the 4:5. He had first turn. Good; that was an advantage.
Each drew seven dominoes and Stile was pleased to note that his hand had a run of Fours: the 4:0, 4:2, 4:8 and 4:11. He played the 4:8. As he had hoped, his opponent was unable to play, being short of Fours; she had to draw three times before she could make a match. Stile played one of his other Fours.
So it went. Confused by the vastly extended range of the dominoes, and lacking the wit to eliminate the highest ones from her hand, the woman lost and delivered a goodly score to him. They played another hand, and a third, and he passed 200 points and won. She had never scored at all. Stile had made it to Round Three without even a scare.
The woman just sat there, after the Game, her face set. Stile realized, belatedly, that she must have lost her first match; with this second loss she would be out of the Tourney, doomed to immediate and permanent exile. Some serfs suicided rather than leave Proton. They were the lowest class of people, here, destined only to serve the arrogant Citizens, yet it was all they craved in life. Stile understood this attitude, for he had until recently shared it. Only the opening of the miraculous horizons of Phaze had given him a better alternative.
He was sorry for the woman. Yet what could he do? She had no chance to win the Tourney anyway. It was best that she be put out of her misery promptly.
Like Sheen? No, of course not like that! Yet the thought lingered, a shadow that could not quite be erased.
He left the woman there. He did not feel good.
As Stile and Sheen reentered the apartment, the communication screen lighted. “Report to your Employer for an update,” a serf-functionary said crisply, showing the identification of the Lady Citizen for whom Stile worked. “At this time, in this place.” And a card emerged from the letter-slot.
Sheen took the card. “Oh, no!” she complained. “We have only half an hour to get there, and it’s at an isolated dome. I had hoped to have time to—”
“For a machine, you’re certainly hung up on one thing,” Stile teased her.
“I’m programmed to be!” she snapped.
She had been fashioned to appeal to his tastes, and evidently his tastes ran to beauty, intelligence and desire for his attention. Stile realized again, not comfortably, that he was in this respect a typical man. His human interests seemed unconscionably narrow when reflected so obviously. Yet Sheen was, in all respects but one, his ideal mate. That one canceled out the rest: she was not alive. She was a construct of metal and pseudoflesh and artificial intellect.
Yet he knew now that even had Sheen been a real person—a real live person—she would not have been able to retain his full devotion after he encountered the Lady Blue. Because what had been his ideal woman two months ago was that no longer. The Lady Blue had a detailed and fascinating past as well as a future; she was changing with the passage of time, as Sheen could not, and so was matching Stile’s own development. The Lady Blue had reshaped his ideal, conforming it to her likeness in flesh and personality and history. He was becoming acclimatized to the world of Phaze, and was losing identification with the world of Proton.
It was not merely a matter of women; he would have loved Phaze regardless. Magic had become a more intriguing challenge than the Game. But he had a commitment here in Proton, and he would see it through. And he had a gnawing need to ferret out his anonymous enemy and bring that person to an accounting. Who had lasered his knees? Who had sent Sheen to guard him? He could never rest content in Phaze until he knew the answers.
But Sheen was already bustling him out. “We can’t keep a Citizen waiting; we have to get to that address in time.”
“I suppose so,” Stile agreed, resenting the waste of time. In one sense, a serf’s employment by a Citizen ended when that serf entered the Tourney, since all tenure was terminated by such entry. But in another sense employment continued, for Citizens identified with those of their serfs who entered, making bets on their success. Many Citizens gave serfs time off to practice for the Tourney, so as to do better; Stile’s own Employer had done that. And if he won an extension of tenure, he would still need an Employer for that period. So whatever the technical status, he had better act in a manner conducive to the Citizen’s good will.
“I didn’t know she had a dome at this address,” Sheen remarked as they hurried to a subtube station. As a machine, she had little genuine curiosity, but with her programming and under Stile’s tutelage she had mastered this most feminine quality. Hardly ever did she make errors of characterization, now. “But of course all Citizens are obscenely rich. She must be watching the Tourney from a private retreat.”
They boarded the tube shuttle. A third passenger joined them—a middle-aged serf woman, well-formed. She was naked, like all serfs, and carrying a sealed freezer-container. “My Employer insists the ice cream from one particular public foodmart tastes better than the ice cream from anywhere else,” she confided, tapping the container. “So every day I have to make the trip and bring it back by hand. She thinks robot delivery distorts the flavor.”
“It probably does,” Sheen said, smiling obscurely.
“Citizens are like that,?
?? Stile said, falling into the ready camaraderie of serfs. “I’m entered in the Tourney, but my Employer requires a personal report instead of the official one, so I’m making a trip every bit as foolish.” He had no worry about visual and auditory perception devices that might report this conversation to the Citizens; of course they existed, but Citizens had no interest in the opinions of serfs, and expected them to grumble privately.
“That’s funny,” the woman said. “There are only three Citizens at this terminus. Mine has no interest in the Tourney, and another’s off-planet on business, and the third—” She broke off.
Sheen became alert. “What about the third?”
“Well, he hates the Tourney. Says it’s a waste of time and only generates new Citizens when the planet has too many already. You couldn’t be seeing him.”
“My Employer is a woman,” Stile said.
“Mine is the only woman on this annex—and she surely is not sponsoring you.”
Stile showed her the address-card.
“That’s the Tourney-hater!” the woman exclaimed. “He’s no woman!” She made a small, significant gesture near her midsection. “I know.”
Stile exchanged a glance with Sheen. The woman had signified that the Citizen borrowed her for sexual purpose, as was his right so long as her own Employer acquiesced. Citizens of either sex could use serfs of either sex this way, and surely a woman knew the sex of her user.
“My Employer is female,” Stile said, suffering a new qualm. Could she have summoned him in the flesh because she wanted to dally with a serf? He would not be able to refuse her, but this was a complication he did not want. “Are you sure that address hasn’t changed ownership recently?”
“Quite sure. I was there only two days ago.” Again the gesture. “Heaven and Hell.”
“Maybe my Employer is visiting him,” Stile said.