the Deadliest Game (1998)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 02 Clancy

  "But only recently," Megan said. "All these bounces are within the last three years of game-time. Why would he just start going after people all of a sudden?"

  "Why wouldn't he?" Leif shrugged. "Something happens at home. Something snaps. All of a sudden he starts playing rough."

  "Well, maybe, but we don't have any evidence to support that idea," Megan said, "and Sherlock Holmes says it's a bad move to hypothesize without enough data. Anyway, all we've got so far is circumstantial evidence."

  "We've gotta start somewhere, though," Leif said. "Argath'll do, unless you can think of somewhere better."

  "I don't know if it's better," Megan said. "I had been thinking of going up to Minsar."

  "Where the last bounce happened."

  "Not so much because of the location itself. But that's where, as they say, 'the eagles are gathered together.' An army, even a little one, doesn't have its commander go missing-and-presumed-bounced without attracting a lot of attention, and that's where they'll be based until the situation sorts itself out...until they find a new lord to swear allegiance to, or decide to disband. We could find out a lot while everyone's descending on the place to do the sorting."

  "Sounds like a good bet. But I still think we should look into Argath."

  Megan made an "oh-why-not" face. "So exactly where is the big A at the moment?"

  "Take a guess."

  "Minsar?" Megan looked bemused. "You're kidding. What would he be doing there? Minsar's much too downmarket for him. One free city isn't going to keep his interest. Argath campaigns for whole countries. Look what he did over in Sarvent, and up north in Proveis! The city isn't at a spot of any great strategic value either. The river's not even navigable up that far."

  "No one's really sure what he's doing there," Leif said. "Maybe the motive's just revenge. After all, Shel did beat him once. There's a power vacuum. Maybe now he thinks he can move in and take over."

  "I don't know." She shook her head. "Argath's been a pretty subtle operator in the past. Why would he do something so obvious?"

  "Carelessness," Leif said. "Certainty that he wouldn't get caught."

  "Well...maybe. But, look, it's like you say, we have to start somewhere...." Megan looked around. "Who do we order a drink from in here?"

  "The innkeeper's daughter. Her dad's busy."

  Maybe it was Leif's slight smile that made Megan give him a brief sharp look. Leif sat there looking innocent until the innkeeper's daughter came by. Megan ordered tea. When it came, she spent a few moments sipping it and looking thoughtful, while Leif turned his attention to watching something that was going on in the darkness under a table off to their right. "So," she said. "How'll we get there? Walk? Or have you got horses outside?"

  "Huh?" Leif looked up, briefly shocked. "Uh, no. I fall off horses."

  "Oh."

  "Don't tell me. You ride."

  Megan made a wry face. "Actually, it's not what I'm best at. I wouldn't mind just long-marching it, except that Minsar's some way from here, and I hate wasting the time."

  "Lucky for you you're traveling with a wizard, then," Leif said. "I have about three thousand miles saved up."

  He appreciated the quick relieved grin Megan flashed him. If you didn't have a horse to help you get around Sarxos, or some other means of transport, like a litter-bearing team, or a tame basilisk to ride, you usually wound up walking...and it could seem to take forever: part of the designer's plan to have you "really experience" his world. But players who chose to could take the points they accrued in play, not as money or power, but as transit: the ability to (with the use of the proper rapid-transit spell, one so simple even nonwizards could manage it) simply disappear from one spot and appear in another. Armies could not use this facility: Rodrigues had been quoted as saying that that would be "too damn much like real life." But people traveling peaceably in company could use it to go wherever they liked.

  "That's a lot of miles," Megan said. "What have you been doing in here to earn all that?"

  "The usual hedge-wizard stuff," Leif said. "Healing the sick...raising the dead."

  Megan raised an eyebrow. Few wizards in Sarxos were quite that powerful. "Well, healing the sick anyway," Leif said, with a slight smile. "When I first got into the game, I bought a healing-stone from a wise-woman who was retiring. It's a pretty good one, good against everything up to about level-five wounds and level-six disease."

  Megan blinked, apparently impressed. "Level five? Anything that can grow back a chopped-off arm or leg must make you pretty popular on the battlefield. How the frack did you afford something like that?"

  Leif laughed softly. "Well, I shouldn't have been able to really. But the lady was nice about it. I met her in the forest and she asked me for a drink of water, and I gave it to her--"

  "Oh," Megan said, "one of those old ladies. You did her a Good Deed, and she Rewarded you." There was a lot of this kind of thing in Sarxos: Rodridgues was not above pillaging old fairy tales, and folktales, and fantasy stories of any age, from the present time straight back to Lucian of Samosata, for familiar and unfamiliar themes. As a result, it was usually a good idea to treat strangers considerately when you met them in the woods. They might be players in disguise...or they might be the game's creator, interested in seeing if you were playing in the spirit he had intended.

  "Well, rewarded, yeah, but she just gave me a discount. She didn't give me the thing for free," Leif said.

  "All the same, sounds like you got a bargain."

  "I did. It's as good a cover for me to go to Minsar as anything would be," Leif said. "There are probably a fair number of wounded who haven't been attended to yet, not by magic-workers anyway. What's your excuse?"

  "Same as usual," Megan said. "Freelance trouble-maker-warrior, thief, or spy, as necessary, and according to who'll pay me. I wander around, see who's doing what to whom, and sell the information to whoever's willing to pay the most. Do the occasional theft...in a good cause, of course. Fight, if it comes to that. Even here, where people should know better, they don't always suspect soon enough that a girl or woman may be as good a fighter as they are, or better." She smiled, a slightly grim look. "They suspect it even less when you don't look like a giant shieldmaiden with a brass bra and a big spear. That suits me fine. I don't mind exploiting archetypes...even if I'm only doing it negatively."

  Leif nodded, thinking. "It's a good persona," he said. "Spies have a good reason to be anywhere...even when they don't, really. And they raise the level of paranoia around them just by being there. People let things slip that they might not have let slip otherwise."

  "Yup." Megan drank more tea, then paused for a moment to look down into her tankard. "What the...There's something in this."

  "What? Extra herbs?"

  "Herbs don't have this many legs. Just a bug," Megan said, pausing for a moment to fish it out, examining it for a moment with a critical eye, and then tossing it over her shoulder. "Okay. So you've got plenty of miles. We'll go after we finish here, then, if you're ready."

  "Yup. I need a few moments to make sure of the coordinates before we go, that's all. Don't want to wind up in Wussonia by mistake."

  Megan looked at him with a bemused expression. "Wussonia? I don't recognize the name."

  Leif grimaced. "It's right over the other side of the Bay of Twilight," he said. "Little place. Isolated. With good reason."

  "Oh?"

  "Don't look so interested! You wouldn't want to go there." Leif shuddered slightly. "The place is, well, it's on the soft side. Full of homesick princesses disguised as bards wandering around on quests for the Magic Whatsit, and wise telepathic unicorns with big eyes full of some ancient sorrow, and little tiny dwarves with pointy hats that ride around on friendly forest animals. Miniature bears and badgers living in little houses built into the trunks of trees. Tiny fluttery fairies with gauzy wings."

  Megan made a face. "Sounds like it would be bad for your blood sugar."

  "Or your sanity. It's not all that
far from Minsar, that's the problem. Misplace a decimal point in the transit spell, and we could wind up there. Or worse, in Arstan or Lidios." He glanced again over at the guy who was, for the third or maybe the fourth time, cleaning his Glock-clone.

  "No, thanks," Megan said, "there are enough guns where I live already."

  Leif nodded and sat back, stretching his legs out. "Even if we're not already on the right track, which I doubt," he said, "we should be able to find out something useful up in Minsar, if as you say the big players are converging on the place. The gossip always runs hottest after a battle...especially a battle where one of the protagonists got bounced."

  "That's what I'm counting on," Megan said. "If we can just--What is it?" she said curiously, for Leif was suddenly looking under the next table again.

  "Uh-oh," Leif said. "Well, I guess this has gone far enough. Esmiratovelithoth!"

  There was a BANG! of displaced air from under the table. Heads snapped up all around the room, most noticeably that of the guy cleaning the almost-Glock. Everyone stared.

  From beneath the table, somewhat grimy and swearing, the inn's landlord crawled. His face and arms were badly scratched; the marks looked like cat scratches, but seemed much deeper and wider than they should have. Muttering, but pointedly not looking at Leif, the landlord got to his feet, brushed himself off, and headed for the kitchen, swearing with constantly increasing fluency as he went.

  The dark-cloaked boy in the chimney corner was laughing, more at the guy with the Glock than at the innkeeper. Megan looked after the latter with interest. "He was that mouse?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Doesn't that violate the square-cube law or something? I mean, what did he do with all that mass while he was mouse-sized?"

  "Hey," Leif said, "it's magic, which means the software handles the sordid details. Don't ask me about software design...it's not my specialty."

  They got up. Megan tossed a coin ringing to the table. The innkeeper's daughter swooped on it, bit it in the approved fashion, and stowed it away in her bodice. "This one's on me," Megan said as the girl went away. "Under the circumstances, you might get in trouble if you tried to pay. Guy might think you were putting a curse on him."

  "Now I would never do a thing like that."

  "Tell him," Megan said, glancing back at the glaring, swearing innkeeper.

  They made their way out.

  Megan was just as glad to be leaving, as a fight had begun brewing between the Glock guy and the dark-cloaked man sitting close to the fireplace. "You lookin' at me?" the Glock guy was demanding. "Nobody else here to look at. You lookin' at me?"

  "Gonna be lively in there in a few minutes," she said as she and Leif headed toward the big square of grass that was the "village green" in front of the Pheasant and Firkin.

  "Better to get away now then," Leif said. "More interesting stuff's going on in Minsar anyway. By the way, when we get there, do we 'know each other'?"

  Megan thought about that as they made their way through the evening dark to an empty patch of grass across from the tavern. Here and there, in the grass, sheep were grazing, and they had left in the grass the kind of thing sheep frequently leave behind them, so that Megan watched where she put her feet. "I don't see why we shouldn't. There are enough chance meetings in Sarxos that no one's likely to suspect anything in particular. And neither of us is high-profile enough to attract any attention by being in the other's company."

  "Right," Leif said. "Okay, we can make the transit from here."

  "Not there," Megan said, pointing at the ground. "Unless you want to bring that big lump of sheep by-product with us."

  "Oh." Leif moved over a few feet. "Right."

  "How big is the transit locus?" Megan said.

  "Five feet. Ready? Here we go."

  Megan looked around her to make sure nothing she needed was outside the five-foot locus. Nothing was. Her weapons were all very closely fastened to her person, the ones that weren't already part of her.

  Leif said a sixteen-syllable word.

  The world went black, then white, then dark again, and Megan's ears popped hard. Then a few seconds later, they popped again, while she was still trying to rub the dancing phosphene-dots out of her eyes. The problem with these transit spells was that they briefly did the virtual-reality equivalent of popping you into and out of hyperspace, and left you disoriented and half blind for some seconds, as if someone had blown off a flashbulb in your face.

  Megan blinked. Her vision was returning fast. They were standing in the profound stillness of a thick dark pine forest, of the kind that appeared in entirely too many fairy tales, and night was coming on fast. The city of Minsar was nowhere to be seen.

  "You missed," she said, trying hard not to sound too accusatory.

  "Merde," Leif muttered, "bloody damn du tonnere, how'd that happen?"

  "I wouldn't worry about it," Megan said, restraining herself to keep from laughing. She knew Leif was good with languages, but this was not the kind of use she normally pictured such a talent being put to. "Let's just find out where we are."

  "Yeah, right..." Leif looked around him, then put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, piercingly.

  Megan watched with slight envy. Even with four brothers, this was one talent she had been unable to master. Her teeth were apparently just in the wrong places relative to one another. Leif whistled again, louder, then looked around, expectant.

  There was a rustling in a pine tree near them. Something black dropped from a higher branch to a lower one.

  It was a pathfinder bird. The birds were positioned here and there around the game as general advice-givers. In Sarxos, if nowhere else, you could safely claim, when someone asked you about something, that "a little bird told you." Some of them were not so little. This one was the size and color of a crow, but it had an intelligent and slightly nasty look that few crows could have mastered.

  "Hey," Leif said, "we need advice."

  "Just got a fresh supply in this morning," said the bird, in a rather smarmy voice that suggested that it had been a used-car dealer in a previous life. "If you turn off here and take that road for a mile or so," and it pointed off to the left with its beak, "you'll find before you, on a high peak, a fair maiden lying on the rock, surrounded by fire--"

  "Oh, no, no way," Leif said hurriedly. "I know how that one ends. Nuclear war would be preferable."

  "You sure wouldn't get as much singing afterwards," Megan said. "Bird, which way is Minsar from here?"

  The bird eyed her coolly. "What's it worth to you?"

  "Half an English muffin?"

  The bird considered. "You're on."

  Megan rooted around in her pack and came up with it, beginning to crumble it onto the ground. The bird flew down and began pecking at the bits, but Megan took a step forward and shooed it away.

  "Hey!" said the bird, aggrieved.

  "Directions first," said Megan.

  "Stay on this road for a mile and a half, take the first left, hold that for a mile and a half, and you'll be at the fords," the bird said. "The city's two miles north of there. Now gimme."

  Megan stepped back, and the bird fluttered forward. "I tell you, it ain't like it used to be," it muttered as it started gobbling the muffin crumbs. "No trust, that's the problem. Nobody trusts anybody anymore."

  Leif chuckled. "Nobody gets anything for nothing here, you mean," he said. "Bye-bye, birdie."

  The bird, busy stuffing its face, didn't answer.

  They walked away. Leif still looked a little put out at having messed up his first transit. "I can short-jump us from here," he said. "Coordinates shouldn't be a problem."

  Megan shrugged. "Why use up good miles when we're so close? We might as well walk. It's not like the forest's haunted, or anything."

  "I haven't heard that it is," Leif said. "But still..."

  "If you want to jump, okay," Megan said. "But a few miles in the dark doesn't bother me."

  "Oh, well...you're right, I guess. Come on.
"

  They walked. Getting to Minsar took them something over an hour, and they heard and smelled the place long before they saw it. It was not the city proper they smelled first, though. It was the battlefield, down by the fords.

  Subjective time in Sarxos passed more slowly than it did in the real world. Rodrigues had apparently intended this from the beginning, both as a way for his players to get more experience for their money, and as a punning reference to the old legends about the way time was supposed to go more slowly for those taken away by elves or other supernatural beings into the Otherworlds. This meant that it might have been a week and a half in the outside world since Shel Lookbehind's battle with Delmond, but here only a few days had passed; and not even a whole army of scavengers could have cleaned up the Fords of Artel by now. It being well after dark, the carrion birds were gone. But as Leif and Megan walked down to the fords, and their footsteps crunched on the gravelly strand, many glinting eyes looked at them from across the river, curious, their feasting disturbed.

  "It's just wolves," Leif said.

  Megan gritted her teeth, as much at the smell as at the sight of all those interested eyes, as the two of them waded across through the cold swift water. "Just. Just about a hundred of them."

  "Smells like they've got plenty to keep them busy," Leif said. "They won't bother us."

  "Nope," Megan said softly. Leif glanced at her, and looked slightly surprised at the length and sharpness of the knife that had suddenly appeared in her hand.

  "Where'd you have that?" he said.

  "Out of sight," Megan said, as they made their way through the middle of the battlefield--there was no use trying to go around it; bodies were everywhere. The eyes watched them as they passed, then became interested once again in their grisly meals. In the silence of the night, the wet sound of flesh being eaten and bones being chewed was loud.

  Megan was very glad when they finally got up to the road, and the noise faded away behind them, around a curve. The smell took rather longer to wane, and by the time it was gone, they were already smelling Minsar's sewage system, which dumped the run-offs from the gutters down the centers of its streets into pools out beyond the walls.