“Agreed. But it must be a fair game.”
“Aye. We shall decide together. Or wouldst prefer to have Mischief decide?”
“No!” Then Lysander had to laugh. “No, we shall come to our own agreement. Only when both are satisfied will it be set.”
“Aye.” Oresmite smiled. “We have time.”
There followed several days of negotiations. Oresmite, being old and small, would not commit to any brute physical contests. Lysander, wary of the elf’s lifetime experience, rejected those that were culturally oriented. Intellectual games like chess or go were tempting, but Lysander wasn’t sure how much the elf might have played these to wile away the time, and Oresmite was nervous about Lysander’s analytic Hectare brain.
“Methinks we require a new game, ne’er before played,” the Chief remarked at last.
“Yes. So that neither experience nor special aptitude is likely to count.”
They brought the others in on it. The challenge: create a new, fair, playable but unplayed game whose outcome could not be certain.
The boredom evaporated as elves and human beings got to work. Proposals were made, analyzed, and rejected.
The key, as it turned out, came from an elf child. He had been listening to the stories of the history of magic before Phaze, when it had existed back on Earth. “Why not Merlin and the Witch?” he asked.
This was an episode recorded by T. H. White in a book titled Sword in the Stone but later excluded from a larger compendium, perhaps because it revealed too much about magic. Merlin had fought the witch by form changing, each trying to assume the form of a creature that could demolish the other. Merlin, sorely pressed, had won by becoming a germ that infected and killed the witch’s monster.
“But I can’t change forms!” Lysander protested.
“Nor can I, neither any elf,” Oresmite replied. “But we can in illusion.”
The illusion chamber was normally used to generate lovely vistas similar to those of the outside world, so as to lessen the claustrophobic restrictions of the caves. But it could be turned to any fancy. A person had only to take his place at one of the focal points and imagine something, and it was animated in the chamber. There were regular puppet shows, the puppets illusory but realistic, because complete living detail wasn’t expected in such creatures. Few could imagine sufficient detail to make an image seem truly realistic.
But if animals could be represented crudely, puppet-fashion, as pieces in a game, then it might be feasible. He could imagine a tiger, chasing the elf’s antelope. Only the elf would then imagine a dragon, and turn on the tiger. Then—
“But we’d just both wind up with the biggest, most ferocious monsters, and it would be a stalemate,” Lysander said. “Or as germs, trying to infect the other. I don’t think it would work as well as it did centuries ago on Earth.”
“Aye,” the Chief agreed. “It were a nice notion, but impractical.”
“Not necessarily,” Beman said. “Appropriately restrictive rules could make a fair game of it.”
“Agreed,” Nepe said. “Scientific rules applied to the magic. To prevent stalemates.”
“Then work it out,” Lysander said, intrigued by the notion of being able to change forms, if only in imagination. It was as close to magic as he could get, on his own. “If we like it, we’ll play it.”
They retired with a committee of elves to work it out. Next day they returned with the proposal for “Animals.” Oresmite and Lysander reviewed it and liked it. They had their game.
The Chief took the key position at one end of the chamber, and Lysander the one at the other end. At the sides sat elves and human beings holding pictures of assorted animals ranging from ladybugs to fire-breathing dragons. The animals were paired, with one of each kind at each side of the chamber. One side represented Lysander’s animals, the other the Chief’s, and they were even.
Each player had an iridium coin. They flipped them together. Lysander’s bounced, flipped, and settled down with the picture of an equine tail showing. The Chief’s coin spun and rolled, finally falling with a donkey’s head in view. The two did not match, which meant the result was odd rather than even, and that meant by prior agreement that Oresmite chose the first animal.
The Chief glanced at his pictures. One glowed, and its figure jumped off the paper to take its place in the chamber beside the pictures. It was a donkey, appropriately.
Lysander looked at his pictures. He focused on the unicorn, and it left its paper and hit the chamber floor running. It charged the donkey, its horn lowering to point forward.
The onus was on him, as predator, to dispatch the prey within one minute, or forfeit the game.
The donkey took off, running fleetly. The illusion expanded to fill in the surrounding terrain: a grassy plain, bordered by mountain ranges to north and south. It was a miniature of the frame of Phaze, with the seas at east and west and the dread Lattice at the center: the network of deep crevices in which demons lived. The animals were bounded by these natural features, and could not go beyond them. But there was plenty of room to maneuver.
The unicorn was faster than the donkey, and its horn was capable of making a lethal thrust. In thirty seconds Lysander had almost closed the gap. The donkey dodged, but so did the unicorn; the imagination that made the creatures go was limited by their natural abilities. The Chief had to act.
He did. The donkey became a tiger, whose paws skidded as it turned to face the unicorn.
Lysander veered aside. The tiger was trouble. True, the unicorn could spear the feline with the horn—but the tiger knew how to avoid horns, and if the first thrust didn’t score, the tiger would pounce and bite. The prey had become the predator.
Now the tiger had one minute to bring down the unicorn, or forfeit. The onus had shifted.
Lysander elected to remain with the unicorn, because there was an advantage in avoiding change. An animal could be used only once; then its sign was taken down, and it was retired. If one side used up all its animals, and the other saved a number, that other side would have a significant advantage in the end game. That player would be able to use a fleet animal to catch the other, then shift to a killer animal for the finale.
The unicorn took off. The tiger leaped after, but already the unicorn was at speed. The tiger put forth its best effort, and gained, but it was evident that it would be unable to close the gap within a minute, if at all. Tigers were good for the short run, but not for the long, while unicorns could run all day if they had to. The Chief had to change forms again, or lose by default. That onus was a deadly thing!
The tiger became a flying dragon. The onus was still on the Chief, because it belonged to the last form change, but the minute started fresh from the moment of that change. Lysander had gained a long-range advantage, because he was on his first animal while the Chief was on his third, but that dragon could finish the game in the short range.
Indeed, in a moment the dragon was looming overhead and orienting its snoot for a fiery blast. He had to change!
He changed to a salamander, and stared up at the dragon. The dragon did a doubletake and popped into a blind eel. The eel fell to the ground and wriggled desperately away. The Chief had been caught by surprise and made an error; he should have continued his attack, because though a magic salamander was immune to fire, it wasn’t immune to teeth. The Chief had confused it with a basilisk, whose stare could kill; the Chief had taken the handiest way to stop the meeting of the eyes by adopting an eyeless form.
Lysander scrambled after the eel, who wasn’t well suited to motion on land. The eel heard the noise and hastily became a hawk, who flew away without looking back.