We met at sundown on Meat Street for one last meal at Open Seasoning. We ate quietly, even Magpie, though he kept glancing at a stack of packages wrapped in brown butcher paper that he’d brought in with him and refused to explain.
Maybe because she caught the heavy feeling of fate that hung over our meal, Naila outdid herself on our dinner, grilling up four fat, pink steaks that came out gridded with fat black lines in steaming juices. The smell reminded me of the juicy, fat-dripping patties on Regional Manager Roger Sorolla’s grill, a lifetime ago and a world away.
“Is this cow?” I asked Naila as she cleared our empty dishes.
“Cow?” She laughed. “No.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush. “What is it?”
She paused halfway back to the kitchen, two big, greasy plates in each hand. “It’s food.”
“What does that mean?” asked Cass.
“It means don’t worry about it,” Naila said. She turned away as Hearthammer shared a look. Cass stood up.
“Naila, what have you been feeding us?”
The chef looked back with the tiniest hint of a smile on her face. “Well, hell rat is great in fried rice. Harpy is a nice low-fat option. But for steak, it’s gold dog or nothing.”
“We’re eating monsters?” Cass looked green.
“You’re eating animals,” Naila huffed, and her eyes narrowed. “If you prefer extruder meat, you’re welcome to go home.”
Cass’s mouth opened, shut, and opened again. Her face was the red of a coin ready to make a fireball.
“Or,” said Naila, “you can sit down and let me bring you dessert.”
Cass sat down.
“What’s in the packages, Magpie?” Noah asked.
“Oh, yes!” Magpie put his hands flat on the table. “I think it’s time. You guys are going to love this. Noah, would you, please?”
Noah fetched the packages, which were labeled with our gamertags. The three of us unwrapped them as Magpie watched, his excitement written plainly on his face. The butcher paper slid open easily, revealing a folded black bundle. I shook it open to discover a slim black shirt with red stitching. Embroidered over the left breast was a little symbol in silver and gold thread: a long-handled warhammer over a heart.
“Magpie, did you—” I started.
“What on Earth?” said Cass.
“It’s a Hearthammer!” Noah said. His shirt was black as well, with white accents where mine had red. His smile of wonder was matched only by Magpie’s open glee.
“Not bad, eh?” he said. “An adventuring party should have proper outfits, that’s what I think.” His eyes flickered over to me. “Do you like them?”
“Are these bracers?” said Cass, holding up a matched pair of leather greaves.
“To protect your arm from the bowstring,” Magpie said.
“You absolute madman,” Cass said, smiling for the first time in days. “You crazy, wonderful little thief.”
Magpie grinned, but his eyes were on me.
“I love them,” I said, and I meant it.
***
We set out that night, moving under cover of darkness in the hopes of attracting as little attention as possible. Given that, my last act before we left Wellpoint behind took on a special irony.
“This is Linnaea, coming to you live from the road out of Wellpoint,” I said to the black eye of my camera drone. “I have to sign off for a while. But don’t think of this as goodbye. It’s more of a see you soon. Keep an eye on my feed, you guys. Because the next time it comes on, I’m going to show you something that I absolutely, positively guarantee you have never seen before. I’ll be back in a few days—I don’t know exactly when—but in the meantime I want you all to spread the word. Tell your friends. Tell your mom. Tell your mom’s friends. Tell the world. The next time this feed comes online, you’ll want to be there.”
I held up the handheld, my thumb over the Stream button. “This is Linnaea, signing off… for now.”
I tapped the button and tossed the handheld back to Noah, who stowed it in his backpack. I took a long look back at Wellpoint, through the big white houses of the Burbs back to the town proper, then turned and followed Noah to the spot where the cobblestone street became gravel and Cass and Magpie stooding waiting with their hands on the straps of their packs. The Summerlands’ moon hung huge and low in the sky, making blue shadows that pooled around our feet.
I patted Cass on the shoulder. “Here we go.”
We walked for hours in silence. The night was warm, of course, and there was enough light from the moon that we hardly had to watch our steps as we crossed the low, rolling hillocks of the Near Plains. We reached the White Chasm around midnight and camped near its eastern edge.
The next day was as bright and clear as ever, and we made good time on our way toward the Wyvern Peaks. We’d decided not to dare Hard Pass again; we’d been lucky to make it through the first time and had no intention of exposing ourselves to attacks from hitmen, wyverns, or anyone else by trying the crossing a second time. Instead, we spent the next two days reversing the path we’d hiked with Golden Apple, through Dann’s Teeth to Wyatt Falls. We moved faster this time without all the treasure weighing us down and it was hard not to feel that our world had gotten smaller since the day we’d arrived in Portal Square.
We reached Wyatt Falls just as the last red sliver of the sun sank away in the west. Lights were coming on in the town, far more than I’d expected. Wyatt Falls had been nearly a ghost town the last time we’d been there, but now it was showing signs of life. The dirt road into town was lined with tents and studded with campfires where adventuring parties sat sharing dinner.
The center of town—little more than a crossroads where the inn, Expedition Hall, and general store sat at the intersection of two short packed-earth streets—was even more crowded. The inn looked full and its patrons overflowed onto its front porch and from there onto the street. They drank, laughed, and shouted in the light of a few dozen torches stuck into the dirt in a lopsided circle.
A shape came swaggering up to us out of the flickering shadows and resolved itself into Merric, the adventurer we’d met at the base of Hard Pass, with his arms around two new Angels, both in white leather armor.
“You survived!” he slurred. Even if he hadn’t had a bottle in each hand, it would have been obvious how drunk he was. “And you look great!”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “This place was dead last time we were here. Did something happen?”
“You happened, girlie,” Merric said. He gestured at me with a sloshing bottle. “Can’t climb the charts that fast without people noticing. And what do I always say about success?”
“What?” asked Noah.
“Uh…” Merric looked at the young women in his arms, but they both shook their heads. “Uh, I forget. But the point is, we’re doing what you’re doing. Everybody is. Meteora’s here, Lord Blackmore… I even saw St George lurking around. He’s not much of a partier, though. All on the Linnaea plan now. New”—he belched—“new discoveries. Very popular. Good job.” He drummed his fingers against his bottle in a sort of half-clap.
“Did you discover a new type of liquor?” Cass said.
“What, this little shindig?” Merric glanced back over his shoulder. “You get all the big names in one place, there’s gonna be a party. Casualties have gone up forty-four percent since you got here, did you know that? Folks are taking risks again. Well, excuse me if I want to get drunk and get lucky before I go risking my life to find a weird new bug in a cave.” With that piece of philosophy, Merric staggered off back towards the torchlight, his Angels propping him up as surely as when he’d been injured on Hard Pass.
“It’s like the Olympic Village,” said Cass.
“The what?” said Magpie.
“Something my mom told me about when I was a kid,” Cass explained. “They used to have this big sports event called the Olympics every couple years. All the best athletes from around th
e world would get together and compete. I guess they’d all stay in this makeshift town called the Olympic Village, and there was lots of partying and… you know. International relations.”
“Your mom told you that?” There was a deep furrow between Magpie’s brows.
“I did some independent research,” Cass said.
“It makes sense,” I said. “From a sociological standpoint. I mean, think about it. You take a bunch of young, healthy people predisposed to risk-taking behavior, put them all in one place with no supervision, and stir it up with a healthy threat of death and dismemberment. It only stands to reason.”
“Okay then, professor.” Cass slapped me on the shoulder. “Who are you hooking up with tonight?”
***
The answer, as it turned out, was nobody. As we unpacked in one of the little inn’s few remaining rooms, it occurred to me that I had no particular desire to spend the night with anybody other than Hearthammer. We’d been through so much in the Summerlands, been knocked down so many times, but all those indignities had bound us together more tightly than any of our victories could.
Our impotence in the face of Dr Agony’s theft was infuriating, and despite the improvement in Cass’s mood I knew that sooner or later she and I had deal with the fracture it had caused in our friendship. She would come around, I thought, once she admitted to herself that I made a better leader than she did.
The thought that Magpie’s past was still chasing him scared me, too, Expedition’s refusal to acknowledge the problem even more so. But the fact was, the string of disasters had given us an enemy, put a face to the forces that had held us down since childhood. Hearthammer had our problems, but as long as we could point our anguish at Dr Agony and Donna Markan and Apollonia Blomhaugen, it was us against the world.
The story of Magpie’s life made my tension with Cass seem so small in comparison. As I settled into my little feather bed, I decided that he’d earned a spot in Hearthammer before he’d ever set foot in the Summerlands. He wasn’t like the other players, who had almost all been rich or famous or both before they joined the game. He was one of us. He could never replace Jason, either as a fighter or a friend, but it was good to have a full party again.
The thought of Jason pushed a sudden stabbing pang of loss into my chest. He would have loved it in Wyatt Falls. It was beautiful everywhere in the Summerlands, but it was different here than in Wellpoint, which sat among flowering meadows. Wyatt Falls was a little frontier town cut out of the dark woods and that would have warmed the soul of a boy who’d named himself Yukon. As I stared at the shadowed beams of the ceiling, I could see him swaggering out of the inn, down the porch steps, and out into the torchlight to make friends with everyone he could reach. He would have had no trouble finding someone to spend the night with, I thought, as a prickle of heat crept up my neck.
It felt good to sleep in a real bed, though, even if I was the only one in it.
***
The wood was silent except for our footfalls in the heavy leaf cover. The trees here were huge, wide enough that Noah and Magpie could barely touch hands around one, with layer upon layer of thick leaves that turned what little of the sun penetrated them to a deep golden green. They were also ruler-straight, in perfectly spaced rows that made a neat grid aligned to the cardinal directions.
It made navigation easy, but it was unnerving. It was clearly unnatural, and I found myself wishing I could turn my camera on and chatter about how it must have been the handiwork of the elves. Instead I kept my thoughts to myself and walked straight into a trap.
I stumbled over something hidden in the underbrush and fell to my knees with a curse, but had only half a moment to catch my breath before the ground gave way beneath me.
“Help!” I shouted as the leaves and dirt under me began to slide down into an opening pit. Magpie was already running, one hand outstretched, but there was no way he’d make it in time. I felt myself slipping as the slide became a cascade in which I was being pulled along.
I flopped over onto my belly and reached out with both hands, trying to grab a stone, a tree root, anything that would give me purchase against the rush of dirt trying to drag me down. My left hand closed around something thick and mossy: a vine?
Whatever I had grabbed gave way with a snap as the ground collapsed completely in a sudden rush, dumping into a dark pit that went deeper than I could see. I swung forward and slammed into the near wall of the pit, slid a few feet down as the slick, moss surface in my hand sloughed away and finally came to a shuddering stop hanging by one hand over a wide, dark mouth that had swallowed all the dirt it was given and wanted to swallow me, too.
Magpie’s head appeared over the lip of the hole, shadowed against the thin light from above.
“Emma!” he called.
“I’m here!” I shouted back. A thin trickle of dirt started up, sliding past my cheek and falling away into the dark.
“Just hang on!” Magpie called as Cass and Noah peered down on either side of him.
“I’ve only got one hand on—what is this, anyway?” I said.
“It’s a rope,” said Noah. “It looks really old. It’s covered in moss.”
“Okay, I need to get my other hand on it—”
“Don’t!” Magpie and Cass yelled simultaneously.
“What?” I called up. “Why?”
“Uh, don’t worry about it,” said Magpie.
“What?” I shouted.
“It’s kind of coming apart,” Cass said.
“We’re going to find something else,” Magpie called, and his head disappeared.
“Well, hurry!” I shouted back. Cass and Noah retreated as well, leaving me dangling alone, or so I thought. When a new voice called up to me from the depths of the pit, I almost let go of the rope in surprise.
“You there!” It was a man’s voice, deep and commanding. “Girl!”
“What?” I shouted down into the void.
“Are you an adventurer?” the man called. The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Yeah, you?” I replied. The whole thing had a faintly ridiculous air, like I was chatting in Portal Square and not about to fall to my death.
“I am a weapon of God,” the man said primly and I instantly knew who I was talking to: St George, the Crusader of the Summerlands. He was my mom’s favorite player, but more importantly, he’d saved Magpie’s life in Portal Square when we’d first come through.
“Are you stuck?” I asked.
“Indeed,” St George called. “I was trapped here by some devilry! The earth gave way, tumbling me into this mouth of Hell, and before long the open sky above had sewn itself shut again. Look, even now it grows closed!”
I glanced up, and was horrified to see that St George was right. The ground around the pit was moving, reaching out dirty roots to make a lattice over the opening. As I watched, a few leaves fell from a high-up branch to land exactly over the hole, hiding a sliver of the sunlit canopy.
“Guys?” I called.
“Have your companions free us!” shouted St George.
“No shit!” I yelled back. “Guys!” There was no response.
The ground closing above me was like a shroud of panic being laid over my mind. I shook my head to try to clear it away and make myself think properly. I was a wizard, after all.
My grip on the rope slipped a few more inches, sending another miniature avalanche of dirt and rotten leaves into the pit.
“Okay, I’m gonna try something!” I called down into the dark. With my free hand, I flipped open my belt pouch, pulled out a copper coin, and began rolling it over my fingers. It was just starting to grow warm when it rolled off my pinky into the open air and tumbled down into darkness. I didn’t hear it land.
“It’s no hope!” St George’s voice was firm. “Drop down here and seek an exit with me.”
I ignored him and took a long, slow breath, forcing my jackhammering heart to slow. I reached back into my pouch and felt around: be
lls; pencil; a few coins that felt too big… was I out of coppers? No, there was one more, hidden halfway inside the mouth of a bell. I slid it free.
I braced myself against the dirt wall as best I could, trying to keep my free hand level, and began to roll the coin. Soon it was warm and not long after that it began to glow a dull red. I gave it a few more seconds, letting it get bright and almost white, then held my breath and flicked it straight up to the grid of wan light that marked the closing mouth of the pit.
The coin ticked off a tangled root and burst into a ball of flame. I shut my eyes against the sudden glare as a rush of heat buffeted me. When I opened them, green sunlight greeted me from the reopened hole. My heart leapt in sudden hope, then the rope in my hand gave way.
A second rope, weighted with a fist-sized rock, swung down from the opening and nearly hit me on the head. I grabbed it with both hands just as the pit wall collapsed and fell away, leaving me swinging in the gloom. There was a moment of lurching terror as I fell a few feet; then the rope went taut and I jerked to a stop.
“Pull!” someone called up above. I rose a few sudden feet, clutching the rope in a terrified grip. “We’ve got her! Pull!”
Slowly, I rose towards the opening, which was already beginning to weave itself shut with new reaching tendrils. As soon as my head crossed the lip, I reached out a hand to Magpie, who stood sweat-streaked and filthy with his feet braced against the ground and the rope in both hands. His face split in a huge grin as he grabbed my arm and heaved me up onto solid ground.
“Oh, thank God—” he started.
“Someone else!” I gasped, rolling onto my back. “St George! Rope!”
Expedition- Summerlands Page 20
