He sniffed the region. The smell of monkey was definitely there—but was the monkey still inside, or had it—
He heard a noise just above him, on the slope. He looked up—and the blast of the skunk caught him in the face, blinding him.
Too late, he realized what had happened. He had not lapped Mach; Mach had followed, one medium behind, keeping out of sight, and come up on him while he was distracted by the cave. The slope of the mountain had concealed the Predator, so that he needed only a few seconds’ distraction time to get close enough. Bane had given him that time, and lost the game.
All he had had to do was keep moving, completing the course. Mach could never have caught him. But, wary of the nonexistent trap, he had fallen into a worse one: the trap of incaution.
“I saw it,” Agape said. “The Game Computer puts the games on holo. We saw him following you, and creeping up on you at the end.”
“What a fool I must have seemed!” he lamented.
“It is always easier to judge the play when you aren’t in it,” she reminded him. “We knew he had not remained, so could not be caught by your lapping him and putting him away so you could finish the course. But you did not know, and we knew that too.”
But his chagrin went deeper than that. “Could it be that I dawdled because I wanted not to win? That I betrayed my cause?”
“You wouldn’t do that!” she protested.
“How can others be sure? How can I be sure?”
She paused, considering. “There is another game tomorrow.”
“Aye. Needs must I prove therein I be no malingerer.”
“You will,” she said. But she could not ease his doubt.
Bane was Predator again for the third game. This was the critical one; if he won, the match was over.
Mach stepped through the curtain. Five seconds later, Bane followed.
He was a dragon. Not a fire-breather, not a flying creature, but nevertheless a dragon, with horrendous teeth and claws.
Ahead of him was a salamander. That was a far smaller creature, but formidable enough in its own right, because it could set fire to any vegetation it touched, and burn most other creatures. Dragons, however, were immune to heat, because so many of them were firebreathers; even those who were not, like himself, possessed enough of the fire-resistant scales and mouth armor to resist the efforts of the salamander. Thus the dragon could chomp the salamander, and the salamander was the Prey.
The landscape was fantasy too: exotic enchanted plants grew high, bearing blossoms that natural flowers could never manage. Bane recognized poison sprayers and sleep weeds and illusion spikes. As a dragon, he had little to fear from these, but a man would have had, literally, to watch his step.
However, there could be aspects of this setting that could damage a dragon, such as clefts in the ground covered by illusion. He would have to watch the path taken by the salamander, and if he saw anything strange, be warned. Meanwhile, because of the prospects for illusion, he could not afford to let the Prey get out of his sight; he could lose critical time trying to locate it through the fog of illusion.
They wound through a forest whose trees supported monstrous webs. The hidden giant spiders could not hurt either contestant because only a contestant could harm a contestant, but they could impede progress significantly. If the salamander got entangled, the dragon could catch it; if the dragon got caught, the salamander could gain vital time.
The trees thinned out, and they came to the water.
This was an inverted lake: broadest at ground level, with the water extending up instead of down in an irregular dome. Effects like this did not exist in Phaze; this magic setting was Grafted of imagination rather than reality.
The salamander plunged in. Bane followed. He was now a sea serpent, chasing a kraken. The kraken was a monstrous magic weed whose stems and branches were tentacles. They had little stickers that stung and poisoned the flesh of ordinary creatures, but the hide of the sea serpent was too tough to be affected. If he caught up with the kraken, he would simply bite off its tentacles, making it helpless.
The kraken was aware of this, and propelled itself through the water by stroking with flattened tentacles, making the same speed that the serpent could by threshing its coils. The two of them churned the water, generating myriads of bubbles that sank quickly to the bottom surface.
Bane was gaining. The kraken could move as rapidly as the serpent, but it took Mach a while to catch on to the most efficient use of his paddle-tentacles. By the time he plunged out of the far side of the lake, Bane was only two seconds behind.
In air, Bane was a roc: a monstrous predatory bird, said to be able to carry an elephant aloft in its talons. Bane believed that was an exaggeration; nevertheless, very few creatures on land or in the air debated territory with a roc. Mach was a wyvern: a small fire-breathing flying dragon. He was of course no match for the roc, but dangerous to most other creatures.
They flew through colored clouds: red, green, blue, yellow, black. These might be harmless, but could also be nuisances; the wyvern brushed by a green one, and its substance adhered, stretching like taffy, fouling a wing. The wyvern whipped back its snout and blew fire at it; the green taffy shriveled and smoked and let go, but Mach had lost time. Bane was now only one second behind.
Thereafter they both skirted the clouds. Most were probably just vapor, but neither player could afford to take the chance that it wasn’t. Time was at stake, and a shift of a single second could make the difference.
They plunged through the horizon, and now Bane was the salamander, chasing a basilisk. There was the completion of the circle: the basilisk was a small lizard, but its glance could stun or kill other creatures. It could not hurt the salamander, because the salamander could engulf it in a wave of fire, obscuring its glance in smoke and flame and cooking its body. But it could stun the dragon, who lacked the fire.
But with only one second separating them, the basilisk had no time to turn and glare back, and the salamander no time to start a fire. They simply ran, both maintaining the pace, keeping to the same path as before, avoiding the devious plants.
They reached the inverted lake and plunged in. Now it was Bane who was the kraken, and Mach was a siren: a creature with the body of a mermaid and a voice that could lure ships and large creatures to their deaths against great rocks in the water. That would be bad for the sea serpent, who would naturally have a taste for so soft and lovely a creature, and who would be charmed by her eerie voice. But the kraken was tone-deaf, and its appetite was too ravenous to be charmed away by prey, and rocks did not affect its streaming tentacles. It would simply squeeze the siren to death, then suck the body dry.
Bane knew how to use the tentacles to move the creature forward, but Mach was having no trouble with the siren, so the distance between them did not narrow. They forged through the water and out to the air.
Bane became the wyvern, and Mach was a harpy. There, again, was the circle: the wyvern could blast the harpy with fire, if it ever got close enough to remain in range while it took a deep breath, but the harpy’s poisoned talons could poison the roc.
They followed their curving route between the clouds, which had not moved, neither risking any deviation. Mach, again unfamiliar with the dynamics of the new creature, lost another half-second before attaining full velocity. Then they proceeded to the horizon, and through.