soon filled his entire field of vision.
A monstrous panoply of steel and brass was all he could discern through the clearing bank, a vertical machine-face whose far battlements and eyries were rimed with cloud.
Nathan was startled by the repetition of his name through loudspeakers. A patch of flame leapt from hand to his forehead. This seemed the precursor of a targeting beam, as the ray widened to the width of a telephone pole.
This light arced down from a crane-frond hundreds of metres above. This limb of burnished metal had a thousand siblings, Nathan saw. Some were obviously weapons platforms, forested with howitzer barrels or rocket tubes. Still others were great spheres shiny-clad in a livery of blades.
It's like the Plain of Weapons, thought Nathan, only attached to some Godzilla robot of doom that would dwarf a mountain.
Indeed, whether the machine relied on wheels or legs for locomotion was impossible to determine. The very structure was in-cognizant; bound to morphology in flux. Once you caught the upswing of a lever or ratchet, its motion was soon lost in the swirling miasma of steel and brass, not to be seen again.
The boy thought at once of M.C. Escher, whose etchings adorned Scott's wall. Nathan had heard that Escher's absurdly tyrannical perspective was impossible to replicate inside a computer.
Such counter-intuitive physics were the preserve of human perception alone.
Nathan liked that. There was a world that could never be quantised away, ever outlaw to the pitiful dictates of reason. It was an affirmation.
The targeting laser swept from him. A roar of discharging cannon; the insistent shove of displaced air as the shockwave of an explosion rearwards came upon him. The amplifier crackled to life.
"Got the bastard!" shouted Jeremy.
Ian's rueful voice came through the speakers.
"A railgun shot would have been better.”
"Same difference," said Jeremy.
Nathan rose up, borne insistently skywards by pressure at both soles. He avoided over-studying the structure. Stuttering bursts of shadow played at his closed eyelids. Intermittently, his nose was enfolded by pungent shoals of kerosene and cordite. The boy opened his eyes.
His friends sat in a globular turret high up in the leviathan's midsection. Constructed from ironwork in wicker-basket fashion, they sat recumbent at a bank of levers, buttons and joysticks. Each toggle was labelled in ominous shades of red and black. A section of the canopy warped into itself like a slow splaying of spider's legs. Nathan stepped through the resulting aperture.
"I wanted a door with explosive bolts there, but I was outvoted," said Ian.
Nathan pointed out that there would be three people needed to cast votes.
"Well," said Jeremy sheepishly, "we use Death, but he doesn't really make any decisions on anything. In fact, mostly he just stands around and we guess what he's thinking.”
"What was it you guys were shooting at?" asked Nathan.
Ian touched a pane beside his helmet, the bubble-visor of which dissipated like a swarm of bees in the wind.
Jeremy began to explain this marvel, but Ian cut him off excitedly.
"That target you set up for us. The Knight.”
Nathan sat down. A part of him had known this as soon as the gun had fired.
"It was a ...” Ian stopped speaking and looked at Jeremy.
Jeremy's visor strobed a jolly roger in chunky digitised blocks.
"Standard H.E. warhead loadout.”
Ian drew a revolver from a chest holster and aimed to Nathan's side. Pulling of the trigger resulted in a report scarcely louder than a handclap. An impish wisp of flame vented from the barrel. Nathan stifled a laugh. Ian pointed at the plain below. A mushroom cloud the size of a tennis court boiled up blackly from a distant hill.
Jeremy's voice was high with excitement.
"Ian's gun is firing thermobaric submunitions, approximating 5 kg's of R.D.X.”
Nathan nodded and forced his eyes down below to the site of the initial blast.
"He gives us anything we ask for, Nathan,” said Jeremy, “and we don't even have to ask him, really. You just have to wish for it in your heart and it arrives. Like in a game.”
A tactical bomber appeared above Ian's head, aligned vertically, and to Nathan's astonishment its steely tonnage actually dangled, massive tailfins trailing to and fro at the wind's touch. Its means of suspension was lost to sight; the cupola was engulfed with the smell of aviation fuel. The boy's leviathan sank slowly forward, with an aperture forming in its upper heights. Coated with fighter jets, its maw widened and consumed the bomber whole.
Nathan shivered, for this projection of metal had obscured the sun.
"I want to see the blast zone down there," said Nathan. "Can you put me down?”
Jeremy laughed.
"Just jump down," he said. "You'll float there.”
Ian shook his head vehemently.
"It's better training if you create a drop-pod or something.”
Jeremy considered this for a moment.
"Let Nathan decide," he said.
Nathan declared that floating would be best, perhaps with a disc of metal to support his feet. This was duly provided, and the boy gingerly stepped onto the elevator. The quadrant of the machine his descent traversed seemed devoted to close combat.
A pair of hammers, their grey faces dwarfing the boy many times over, drew slow passes above and below him. A thrumming rumble preceded the passage of these monsters. A wake of steam and oil-vapour trailed thinly behind.
Finally Nathan alighted the disc and walked down towards the blast site. At any moment he expected the deployment of some folly of Ian and Jeremy's to dance before him; a napalm-puppet or tank-baby.
Nathan reached the impact zone. Fires blazed yet in the craters there. His friends appeared atop the opposing rim.
"Absolute devastation," beamed Jeremy. "Just the way we like it.”
A flash of metal to Nathan's right; the book slid lightly from the smoke towards the trio. To Nathan's disappointment, the covers were bound tightly shut.
Ian snorted with glee and drew his pistol. Jumping between Ian and the book, Nathan yelled for his friend to hold fire.
"Do you want to play a skeet game?" Ian asked. "We can take turns trying to shoot it."
Nathan shook his head.
"I don't control the book," he explained.
Jeremy motioned for Ian to lower his weapon.
"Of course you do. Death doesn't move it around because he can't. Death …" The tone became scornful, "Is nothing.” At his behest, Death appeared. Jeremy ordered him to bow, and the skeleton obliged.
Jeremy winked at Nathan and twirled his ankle beneath a raised knee in a cartoon wind-up for a kick.
"Don't," pleaded Nathan. Jeremy's tone was quizzical.
"I've done worse than that to him, Nathan. When we worked the whole thing out, Ian and I spent a whole day firing everything we could think of at him.”
Ian holstered his gun, nodded and said:
"Including a .50 cal like Blackie's.”
"He doesn't do anything," Jeremy said.
"Well just because we can do things to him, that's no reason to" argued Nathan. "We're not Paul Forster.”
"Death isn't us either, Nathan.” Jeremy knelt and scratched the back of his head. He drew a hunting knife from a scabbard by his shoulder and creased a pattern in the dirt.
"He's a servant. We're the rulers here.” He looked up and smiled broadly. "We can do anything we want!”
Nathan said nothing and picked up the book. It had been partially caught in the explosion, he saw. One of the crab's claws was dented, coated in soot.
Nathan used an edge of his T-shirt to smear the grime away, half-expecting the thing to snap open in his hands. What would be written on that final page? Nathan knew now that the Knight was no manifestation of Death.
"Lunch," said Jeremy. "We'll talk about it over lunch.”
"Let's have it up in the galley,"
suggested Ian.
"But off course," replied Jeremy with a smile. He motioned them to look upwards.
Bright shards of silver fell on them - an inundation of Samurai swords. Nathan flinched as they lanced towards his face. He felt an instant's wisping of blade through his hair, then a pandemonium of clattering steel around him. Formed next to the trio was a bowl of blades. Each weapon was so snugly fitted to its neighbour that the boys could safely walk upon them without fear of laceration.
"Ian likes … fantasy stuff," said Jeremy. "Bronze lions with claws of fire, that kind of thing.”
Nathan nodded.
"For me, each object has to be based in reality," Jeremy continued.
Grounded in reality, came to Nathan immediately, but he refrained from correcting his friend as he might have once have done.
Ian clapped his hands regally. The sword-bowl rose at an elevator's pace. Looking over the side, Nathan spied Death receding rapidly below, obscured a moment later as the wind placed a thick strand of smoke below their conveyance.
This should be one of the greatest things that ever happened to us, thought Nathan. To be inside the greatest game that could ever be.
As they ascended, Ian and Jeremy fired a giant crossbow now anchored to the vessel's wall at a helicopter shadowing their progress. Ian's shot pierced something vital within the machine and it collapsed to spiralling flame.
"Can you make live things?" asked Nathan.
Ian and Jeremy shook their heads.
"No, only machines," said Ian.
"I have done androids which look exactly like people," said Jeremy. "A more refined version of the Knight you had constructed.”
Another helicopter wavered into his sight-line, and he slapped down the crossbow's firing lever.
"It's a shame we didn't