Quest Call_The Dowland Cases 2

by Kirk Dougal

  “We'll take care of it.” I was surprised when it was Bree that answered, but for the first time since I entered the game, she appeared oddly calm. Judging from the look on Saleene's face, the response caught her off guard, too.

  “Good, we'll make a pass through the town for food supplies and meet you outside the main gates. I want to be on the road to Breton before the sun is more than a couple of fingers high. From now on, we need to pick up the pace.”

  Chapter 28

  Card found several bags in an old store that were big enough to carry supplies, so we cut down pieces of rope and tied them together in pairs that could be strung over the horses like makeshift saddlebags. With a way to carry the food taken care of, we turned our attention to finding enough provisions to last us on the roundabout journey to the tavern so we were not reliant on hunting as we traveled.

  A handful of the homes near the house we used also contained dried or canned fruits and some root vegetables that had not gone bad. DeBrest stumbled across what would have been a prized treasure, about two dozen loaves of bread, but the hard crusts had gone soft under a blanket of mold and left just a yeasty stench.

  Even with the disappointment, between the three of us, we had a good enough haul that I felt better about our situation. I even lucked upon some oats that we packed for the horses.

  I was just slinging the first of the bags over my mount when Bree galloped through the gate we had opened at first light and down the street toward us. DeBrest drew his sword and ran to one side while the ring of stones suddenly appeared in Card's hand again.

  But no one followed her through opening. She slewed around and stopped in front of me, breathing as hard as her horse.

  “Saleene wants you to come right away,” she said.

  “Did she find something?” I asked, waiting for her nod. “Okay. Card, you and DeBrest finish packing the horses, and I'll check on what they found. We'll meet you in front of the main gates as soon as we're done.” I climbed into the saddle and nodded to Bree. “Let's go.”

  She led me out the gates at a canter but did not turn down either side of the town as I suspected. Instead, she headed across the road and through the untended fields toward the far wood line. Bree slowed to a walk as we rode into the shade, ducking beneath limbs to keep from being swept out of our seats.

  Saleene crept into sight, but her attention was on the ground and not on our approach. We stopped and Bree held my reins as I moved forward. She had not said anything about an immediate danger, but the air was thick and still between the trees.

  “Saleene,” I whispered. “What did you find?”

  She did not look in my direction, but I thought I saw the hint of a smile.

  “They're long gone, Beast,” she said, her voice at a normal volume. “There's no one around to hear you.” Saleene waved me closer and then pointed to the ground. “Look here and here. See how there are footprints in single pairs or sometimes in two or three pairs? I found these same kinds of prints all over the forest behind Bear Run. They were too jumbled to make any sense so I followed them and they all eventually crossed the road and led to here.”

  “So you're saying a few of the townspeople escaped?”

  “More than a few.”

  I nodded. “Good.” A horrible thought flicked across my mind. “Oh, shit. Are you going to tell me the Horde caught up to them? Is that what you wanted me to see?”

  “No,” Saleene said with a shake of her head. “At least not as far as I followed them away from here.”

  “Then what did you want me to know?”

  She crouched down. “Look again. What can you tell me about these prints?”

  I knelt beside her, my hand reaching forward and brushing over the top of the bent grass, not quite touching the blades. “Not very defined so they're several days old, which matches the time line for the destruction of Bear Run. They're also not deep so someone who is lighter. This one is…” I stopped and glanced up. “It's small. This footprint belonged to a child.”

  Saleene nodded.

  I stared at the forest floor again, this time with my eyes wide open.

  “Child, child, child.” I kept pointing at different sets of prints. But the next pair put me back on my heels. “Larger, but still not a man. These belonged to a woman.”

  “Yes.” Saleene stood again. “That's all I found—women and children and maybe a half dozen boys who thought they were old enough to be men.” She waved me forward, and I followed as she walked farther down the dim path. “They left Bear Run from dozens of different spots, climbing over the wall, maybe some of the smaller ones being lowered with ropes tied around their waists. They moved across the road in the dead of night, the Horde howling through the streets, but they all met,” she stopped and pointed at a small clearing in front of her, “here.”

  I stepped beside her and stared. Grass and meadow flowers were trampled into a dying mass, pounded into the ground until it appeared a herd of cattle had been rushed through the area.

  “That's a lot of people,” I said.

  “Women and children,” Saleene reminded me. “Only women and children and none of them went back towards Bear Run. The prints lead south from here. Three separate columns running parallel to each other, and all headed to the south.”

  I stared in the direction she had indicated, waiting for the memories of the escape to show me how the women and children had trudged off in silence, knowing what was happening behind them in Bear Run.

  “What's to the south?” I asked.

  “Gargia.” Saleene paused, but then rushed on. “Remember how I told you I found human bones in the ashes of the burned buildings? And remember how I said there wasn't enough bones for a whole town?”

  As bad as this situation had already turned, I knew I was about to hate it even more. “Yes.”

  “I think the townsmen sacrificed themselves by fighting the Horde so the women and children could escape.” Saleene hesitated on the words, forcing them to the surface as if saying them would somehow make the atrocity truer.

  “The Gargian leaders are not going to like this. Not going to like this at all.” I started backing away. “We need to get out of here now.”

  *****

  We pushed the horses hard and made it back to Breton in half the time it had taken to travel to Bear Run as part of the caravan. With everything that had happened, riding into the city did not hold the same note of accomplishment as the first time, however. Instead, silence settled over our group like a gentle snow, blanketing us with quiet until even the sounds of the horses' hooves were muted to our ears. The ever-present gloom that pervaded the ravaged city did nothing to change our spirits, either.

  We rode directly to the armory, stringing a rope corral in the small courtyard for the horses before moving our gear inside for the night. I decided the safest place for us to spend the night was inside the barracks, once we removed the body of the dead guardsman. Saleene shot a spring buck on the outskirts of the walls, the white spots on his back still faint in his brown fur, and we cooked as much of the venison as we could eat before smoking long strips of the remaining meat for the journey ahead of us. We all knew that the ruins of the keep was the last time we would sleep with a roof over our heads until we reached tavern, and even then, it was not a certainty. Despite the mood that had fallen over us, I knew we might look back fondly on this night in the coming days or weeks.

  “Before we settle in for the night, I want to visit my parents' tomb,” DeBrest said. He rose to his feet and hesitated, waiting in the dying light by the fire.

  I looked at Saleene and Bree, but they were whispering, Saleene gesturing with her hands to emphasize whatever point she was trying to make while Bree worked on scraping down the deer pelt. Card returned my glance in his direction, but only nodded his head toward DeBrest without speaking.

  “I'll go with you, Duke,” I said. “None of us should be wandering around by ourselves after dark.” I gave Card a look as I took his mace. “We'
ll raid the armory after we get back.”

  DeBrest and I walked through the darkening streets, both of us too interested in what we were passing to talk. I realized the city must have been beautiful in its day, filled with people and the sounds of everyday life. In a way, I was glad I had never seen Breton's glory days because the difference between then and now would make the devastation even harder to accept. I glanced over at DeBrest to see if he felt the same, but his face was blank, shadows playing across his cheeks and scruffy beard.

  The outer walls were in sight, a hulking black mass towering over the bare space where the burial mounds rose in a row. I followed DeBrest to the next to last hill where his parents were placed. We stopped in front of the crypt's door, the heavy oak set into the stone frame still barred and locked.

  “Do you want to go in?” I asked.

  DeBrest was quiet for a few seconds, his hand dropping to the pouch at his waist. He pulled out a ring and stared at the inset, the bear's head in the center standing out in the light of the rising moon.

  “I swore I would not put on this ring until I had avenged my parents and everything that happened on the Long Night,” he said. “Right now, that day feels even farther away than it did when Spoon first found me.” He slipped the ring back into the pouch and glanced up at the door again. “After seeing what had happened at Bear Run, I think I just needed to make sure the Horde had not come back and ransacked here, too.”

  “I know Card was just trying to pull you out of how you were thinking,” I said, “but he was right. A leader without a people to follow them is just someone trying to tell other people what to do. Even if you had succeeded in taking out your revenge at Dinas Farwolaeth, your job was just beginning. Bringing Bretonia back to life will take a lot of work.”

  DeBrest nodded before walking forward and placing his hand on the crypt door. I did not hear anything, but his body shook as he stood there and wept.

  *****

  “This probably all feels very silly to you,” DeBrest said as we walked through the city, returning to the keep. “I mean, you're here actually doing something important, and what I'm doing is all just make believe.”

  I shrugged. “Each of us have our own reasons for being inside Quest Call. Who am I to say that my reason is more important than yours?” My thoughts turned to Evelyn for a moment and how she had lived in The City in order to escape the pain of the cancer that had eventually taken her from me. Even then, her hatred for Big C in the game had stemmed from her losing her husband and father to real life gangsters.

  “Yeah, but you're helping real people on the outside. I mean, terrorists. Wow.” We were nearing the keep when he spoke again.

  “What does it take… I mean, how did you get to do what you do?” I felt his eyes on me as he spoke, even though full night had fallen.

  I stopped. This was not a conversation everyone needed to hear, including Card.

  “I was working as a homicide detective when the FBI approached me about helping them find a serial killer.” I hesitated, then decided he did not need to know about Gwen's link to my past. “They wanted me because I had a unique set of skills. You see, I was one of the inventors of immersion gaming, but I got hooked. Before I anyone even knew what was going, I was in full blown DIOD and damn near died. Working as a cop was my way of trying to make up for my past, making amends, because so much of what I had helped to create hurt thousands of gamers. Understand, I've got no wife, no girlfriend, only two or three people I would even call friends—that's the life you'd have to look forward to if you joined the program. I'm inside partly because there's not much on the outside for me.”

  DeBrest kicked his boot into the packed street and then stared off into the night. “Sounds a lot like me. Not a lot of friends, at least not anymore, no girlfriend, family doesn't care, hell, they'd be surprised I was even helping you and the FBI.”

  “How old did you say you are?”

  “I just turned twenty.”

  I snorted. “Shit, DeBrest. You've got your whole life in front of you.”

  His head snapped up and the moonlight shined in his eyes.

  “Not according to my father. He says I've wasted everything that's been given to me. I didn't make the grade at his alma mater and they sent me packing. Not even his money could keep me in school!” His voice dropped to a normal volume. “Does the name Kevan Breckenridge mean anything to you?”

  I nodded. Kevan Breckenridge was a tech star billionaire and anybody who'd ever been in the business knew about him. He had come along a couple of years after The Kindred went to market and shot to the top of the gaming world. At the same time, Breckenridge was developing the next step in artificial intelligence, creating machines that came as close as possible to the way humans thought—only at a million times the speed. His software was in every financial services, retail inventory, and logistics server in the world in some fashion. But those markets paled in comparison to his government contracts, everything from the military to the launching of the joint NASA/ESA/CNSA mission that put robots on Mars that were actually collecting data and performing science programs of their own design. Though as brilliant as he was, Kevan was now on his third wife and, by all accounts, was an absolute tyrant in the boardroom, blitzing through software talent if they were unable to keep up with him. According to his own bio, no one could keep up with him.

  “If your father is Kevan, we've met.”

  DeBrest continued to stare at me. “Then you know what I'm talking about. I was put to the test and did not pass Breckenridge muster. He told me he is ushering in a new era for mankind that will make life better for the next ten generations and his son can't pass Calculus.”

  I finally understood DeBrest. All this time, I thought he was burying himself into his role in Quest Call because he wanted to be great in the game. Now I saw that his accepting the role of avenging his family's honor on the inside of the game was his way of making amends for the outside. If he couldn't make the father in the real world proud, he would make the memory of the computer construct father proud in the game. He was playing with a twisted guilt that saddened me because I recognized it was not too far from where my feelings stood about myself.

  “Let's catch the terrorists,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Then we'll figure out how you can make a difference.”

  *****

  The courtyard was quiet except for the occasional stamp of a horse's hoof or a whinny. We were halfway across the area when a shadow stepped away from the wall, emerging from the black with a whispered footstep and standing tall against the night. I gripped the handle of the mace and stepped sideways from DeBrest, giving myself plenty of room to swing. I also heard the duke's sword ring free as he readied himself as well. I opened my mouth to issue a challenge, but a chuckle floated across the ground to us.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Card said. “It's just me.” He walked toward us, shrinking from a giant to his normal size as he moved, a trick of moonlight and darkness. “You're a bit on edge. Did you find something?”

  I noticed DeBrest let out as big a breath as I did. “No, it's just that the desolation of this place kind of wears on you after a while. Duke DeBrest visited his parents' crypt and it was untouched by the Horde.” I glanced around. “Are Saleene and Bree inside?”

  “Yes,” Card answered. “They should be in the armory. Saleene said something about finding more arrows and maybe a couple of extra bowstrings for both of them. I said I'd take the first watch.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.” I handed the mace back to Card. “I've had nothing but borrowed weapons and my knife to protect me since Dinas Farwolaeth. I'm going to go arm myself again. Duke, are you coming?”

  “No, I'll stay here with Card.” He patted the sword and readjusted the shield over his shoulder. “I've got my father's sword and shield. That's all I need.” The twenty-year-old man who craved a word of praise from his father in the real world had disappeared. DeBrest was fully back in game attitude.

 
“I'll switch with you at midnight, Card.” I turned and walked into the keep.

  *****

  The narrow staircase rubbed my shoulders as I descended into the armory, reminding me how desperate Saleene must be for weapons if she willingly returned to the armory despite her claustrophobia. Voices and light let me know I was getting close before the heavy-framed door came into view. The noises stopped, however, the second I walked into the room.

  “It's just me Saleene, Bree,” I called out. “I want to find a new sword.”

  Saleene's head thrust around the end of a row of shelves holding different kinds of armor. I also noticed she was pulling an arrow away from her bow and replacing it in the quiver around her waist.

  “It's a good thing you spoke out,” she said. “I was about two breaths away from sticking you to the door.”

  “You'd have had to beat me to it,” Bree said. She stood up from behind a row of shields. There was no sign of a smile but she did nod in greeting. Our tenuous understanding appeared to be holding.

  “I'll be sure to sing a song next time. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Saleene and Bree both converged on where I stood by the door.

  “Yes,” Saleene said. She patted the full quiver, and I noticed Bree's held just as many arrows. “We've got all we can carry plus some more packed to put on the horses. They're good arrows, but the fletching needs some work. We'll fix them as we travel.”

  “If you liked that overlapping metal armor you were wearing before, I saw some toward the end of the row Saleene was in,” Bree said.

  “There were some good long swords and hand-and-a-halfs along the wall, too,” Saleene said. We'll meet you over there and help you find something you like.”