Iain Banks: The Player of Games

The fallen were everywhere, scattered over the floor and the galleries, draped over benches, crumpled in corners, spread like Xs on the flagstones, their robes spotted with the dark burnholes of laserburns. Smoke rose from the splintered woodwork and smouldering clothes; a sweet-sick smell of burned flesh filled the hall.

Nicosar weighed the heavy, double-edged sword in his gloved hand, smiling sadly at it. Gurgeh felt his bowels ache and his hands shake. There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and at first he thought it was the implant, rejecting, surfacing, for some reason reappearing, but then he knew that it wasn’t, and realised, for the first time in his life, that fear really did have a taste.

Nicosar gave an inaudible sigh, drew himself up in front of Gurgeh, so that he seemed to fill the view in front of the man, and brought the sword slowly towards Gurgeh.

Drone ! he thought. But it was just a sooty scar on the far wall.

Ship ! But the implant under his tongue lay silent, and the Limiting Factor was still light years away.

The tip of the sword was a few centimetres from Gurgeh’s belly; it started to rise, passing slowly over Gurgeh’s chest towards his neck. Nicosar opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but then he shook his head, as though in exasperation, and lunged forward.

Gurgeh kicked out, slamming both feet into the Emperor’s belly. Nicosar doubled up; Gurgeh was thrown backwards off the seat. The sword hissed over his head.

Gurgeh kept on rolling as the stoolseat crashed to the ground; he jumped to his feet. Nicosar was half doubled-up, but still clutched the sword. He staggered towards the man, hacking the sword about him as though at invisible enemies between them. Gurgeh ran; to the side at first, then across the board, heading for the hall doors. Behind him, outside the windows, the fire above the thrashing cinderbuds obliterated the black clouds of smoke; the heat was something physical, a pressure on the skin and eyes. One of Gurgeh’s feet came down on a game-piece, rolled across the board by the gale; he slipped and fell.

Nicosar stumbled after him.

The screening equipment whined, then hummed; smoke gouted from it. Blue lightning played furiously around the hanging machinery.

Nicosar didn’t notice; he plunged forward at Gurgeh, who pushed himself away; the sword crashed into the board, centimetres from the man’s head. Gurgeh picked himself up and leapt over a raised section of board. Nicosar came tearing and trampling after him.

The screening gear exploded. It crashed from the ceiling to the board in a shower of sparks and smashed into the centre of the multi-coloured terrain a few metres in front of Gurgeh, who was forced to stop and turn. He faced Nicosar.

Something white blurred through the air.

Nicosar raised the sword over his head.

The blade snapped, clipped off by a flickering yellow-green field. Nicosar felt the weight of the sword change, and looked up in disbelief. The blade dangled uselessly in mid-air, suspended from the little white disk that was Flere-Imsaho.

“Ha ha ha,” it boomed above the noise of the screaming wind.

Nicosar threw the sword-handle at Gurgeh; a green-yellow field caught it, propelled it back at Nicosar; the Emperor ducked. He staggered across the board in a storm of smoke and swirling leaves. The cinderbuds thrashed; flashes of white and yellow burst from between their trunks as the wall of flames above them beat towards the castle.

“Gurgeh!” Flere-Imsaho said, suddenly in front of his face. “Crouch down and curl up. Now !”

Gurgeh did as he was told, getting down on his haunches, arms wrapped around his shins. The drone floated above him, and Gurgeh saw the haze of a field all around him.

The wall of cinderbuds was breaking, the streaks and bursts of flame clawing through from behind them, shaking them, tearing them. The heat seemed to shrivel his face on the bones of his skull.

A figure appeared against the flames. It was Nicosar, holding one of the big laser-pistols the guards had been armed with. He stood just within and to the side of the windows, holding the gun in both hands and sighting carefully at Gurgeh. Gurgeh looked at the black muzzle of the gun, into the thumb-wide barrel, then his gaze moved up to Nicosar’s face as the apex pulled the trigger.

Then he was looking at himself.

He stared into his own distorted face just long enough to see that Jernau Morat Gurgeh, at the very instant that might have been his death, looked only rather surprised and not a little stupid… then the mirror-field disappeared and he was looking at Nicosar again.

The apex stood in exactly the same place, swaying slightly now. There was something wrong though. Something had changed. It was very obvious but Gurgeh couldn’t see what it was.

The Emperor went back on his heels, eyes staring blankly up at the smoke-stained ceiling where the screening gear had fallen from. Then the furnace gust from the windows caught him and he tipped slowly forwards again, tipping towards the board, the weight of the handcannon in his gloved hands unbalancing him.

Gurgeh saw it then; the neat, slightly smoking black hole about wide enough to fit a thumb into, in the centre of the apex’s forehead.

Nicosar’s body hit the board with a crash, scattering pieces.

The fire broke through.

The cinderbud dam gave way before the flames and was replaced by a vast wave of blinding light and a blast of heat like a hammer blow. Then the field around Gurgeh went dark, and the room and all the fire went dim, and far away at the back of his head there was a strange buzzing noise, and he felt drained, and empty, and exhausted.

After that everything went away from him, and there was only darkness.

Gurgeh opened his eyes.

He was lying on a balcony, under a jutting overhang of stone. The area around him had been swept clear, but everywhere else there was a centimetre-thick covering of dark grey ash. It was dull. The stones beneath him were warm; the air was cool and smoky.

He felt all right. No drowsiness, no sore head.

He sat up; something fell from his chest and rolled across the swept stones, falling into the grey dust. He picked it up; it was the Orbital bracelet; bright and undamaged and still keeping its own microscopic day-night cycle. He put it into his jacket pocket. He checked his hair, his eyebrows, his jacket; nothing singed at all.

The sky was dark grey; black at the horizon. Away to one side there was a small, vaguely purple disk in the sky, which he realised was the sun. He stood up.

The grey ash was being covered up with inky soot, falling from the dark overcast like negative snow. He walked across the heat-warped, flaking flagstones towards the edge of the balcony. The parapet had fallen away here; he kept back from the very edge.

The landscape had changed. Instead of the golden yellow wall of cinderbuds crowding the view beyond the curtain wall, there was just earth; black and brown and baked-looking, covered in great cracks and fissures the thin grey ash and the soot-rain had not yet filled. The barren waste stretched to the distant horizon. Faint wisps of smoke still climbed from fissures in the ground, climbing like the ghosts of trees, until the wind took them. The curtain wall was blackened and scorched, and breached in places.

The castle itself looked battered as though after a long siege. Towers had collapsed, and many of the apartments, office buildings and extra halls had fallen in on themselves, their flame-scarred windows showing only emptiness behind. Columns of smoke rose lazily like sinuous flagpoles to the summit of the crumbling fortress, where the wind caught them and made them pennants.

Gurgeh walked round the balcony, through the soft black snow of soot, to the prow-hall windows. His feet made no noise. The specks of soot made him sneeze, and his eyes itched. He entered the hall.