An Unwelcome Quest (Magic 2.0 Book 3)

by Scott Meyer

  Gwen said, “Oh, uh, we thought you’d be alone.”

  “Yeah,” Brit the Younger said, “so did I. I’d settled in to read myself to sleep, and then she showed up, saying I was about to have company, but she wouldn’t tell me who or why.”

  Brit the Elder patted the Younger on the knee and said, “It was important that you be awake to receive our visitors. Gwen, Martin, always a pleasure. It’s good to see you again too, Roy.”

  Roy said, “I’m sorry, miss. I’ve met the other Brit a couple of times, but I don’t believe we’ve . . . oh. Yeah. Right.”

  Brit the Elder said, “Mm hmm. Anyway, please make yourselves comfortable. We have important news to discuss.”

  Brit the Younger said, “This is my home. I’ll play hostess, thanks.”

  Brit the Elder said, “Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just hard because this used to be my place, back when I was you. In fact, I still have this couch. It’s an antique now, of course.”

  Nik entered from the next room with a dining room chair that, while beautiful, looked far less comfortable than the other two available chairs. Roy insisted on taking it despite the fact that Nik had placed it closer to Gwen, and Gwen had already started to sit on it.

  Once everyone was comfortable, Brit the Younger looked to Gwen and asked, “What’s up?”

  Brit the Elder said, “They’re here to tell you that Phillip has been abducted.”

  Brit the Younger’s eyes darted from Gwen’s face to Martin’s and back. “What? Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Brit the Elder said. “He and his friends Tyler, Jeff, and Gary. Oh, and Jimmy too.”

  “When?” Brit the Younger asked, still looking to Gwen and Martin.

  Brit the Elder said, “A little over an hour ago. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Martin said, “Yeah, a little over.”

  “Who did this?” Brit the Younger asked.

  “They don’t know yet,” Brit the Elder answered.

  Martin said, “We think maybe Jimmy.”

  “But they don’t know yet,” Brit the Elder repeated.

  Brit the Younger turned to glare at Brit the Elder. “Yet? So you know who did it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  Brit the Elder rolled her eyes. “Dear, you know I can’t tell you about the future. You need to experience it for yourself, the way I did.”

  “But, you were just telling me about the future just now. I was asking them questions and you kept telling me how they were going to answer,” Brit the Younger said without ever unclenching her teeth.

  “No. See, they’re here now, so by telling you what they were going to say I wasn’t telling you about the future. I was telling you about the present.”

  Brit the Younger said, “Fine,” but it didn’t sound like she meant it. “Phillip’s gone now. So, who has him?”

  Brit the Elder shook her head. “See, that’s the problem. Phillip’s gone in the present, but you don’t find out who took him until the future.”

  Brit the Younger pointedly looked away from Brit the Elder and back to Gwen. “Do you think Phillip’s in danger?”

  Brit the Elder said, “Don’t be silly, dear. Of course he’s in danger. His file settings have been restored to their defaults. He’s in grave danger.”

  Brit the Younger closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then continued addressing Gwen. “Where is he? Do you know?”

  Brit the Elder started to say something, but Brit the Younger held up a finger and said, “Shhh!” Brit the Elder pursed her lips but remained silent.

  Gwen said, “Their location parameters have been replaced with a callout to an external program that we haven’t been able to access yet. We don’t know where they are, and any time we try to make a change to their file, it doesn’t take. The external program is preventing us from tampering with anyone in its system.”

  Brit the Younger sat back and thought for a moment, then said, “So what do we do?”

  Martin, Gwen, and Roy all looked at one another, but none of them spoke. Brit the Elder raised a hand and said, “If I may?”

  “Go ahead,” Brit the Younger sighed.

  Brit the Elder cleared her throat. “Gwen would like to research the problem. She suspects that in time we might find the external program and nullify it. Roy, on the other hand, feels very strongly that Phillip and his friends are in danger right now, and that the best course is to reset all of your location settings to the callout for the external program so that you’ll go wherever they are and help them.”

  Roy said, “Damn straight.” Then he quickly glanced at both Brits and Gwen and said, “Pardon my French, ladies.”

  Gwen said, “Your French is fine, Roy, but your idea sounds really dangerous.”

  Brit the Younger said, “I agree. That’s a terrible risk to take.”

  Roy explained, “Maybe, but so is sitting around studying the problem. Our buddies are being threatened. We have to act. Besides, whoever did this was expecting to only get the five people they took. They won’t expect us. We’ll have the advantage, especially if we still have our powers.”

  “But the program, whatever it is, seems to reset wizards to their defaults,” Gwen said. “What makes you think you’ll hold on to your powers?”

  Brit the Elder said, “As I remember, Martin has an idea about that.”

  Roy smirked at Martin. Gwen glared at him. Martin said, “Um, well, I was thinking, what if I carried a copy of the Leadchurch shell program and the Atlantis Interface running on my smartphone? I mean, it’s not like running the file itself, but both of those programs modify the file through a simplified interface, so I figure if we’re running them on a machine that we take with us, it should counteract whatever the other program is doing.”

  Roy slapped Martin on the back. “Good idea, kid.”

  “Yes,” Brit the Elder said. “It will be interesting for you to see if it works.”

  Brit the Younger said, “Will? You said it will be interesting. I suppose that means that we’re going, doesn’t it?”

  Brit the Elder frowned. “I shouldn’t have said that. I guess I’ve let the cat out of the bag. I might as well tell you. You’ll try in vain to ferret out and neutralize this mysterious program, but after a day of intense effort and no progress you will decide to try Roy’s foolhardy idea. I’ll send you on your way. While you are wherever you’re going, trying to save the three of them—”

  “Five,” Martin said. “Five of them are gone.”

  Brit the Elder smiled. “Sorry. My mistake. Anyway, while you’re away the plan is that I stay here and continue to try to get access to that external program.”

  “That’s the plan?” Brit the Younger asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me,” Brit the Younger asked, “if you happen to remember that you fail to get access to the external program anyway, will you even try?”

  Brit the Elder said, “I’m sorry, dear. That’s a question about the future.”

  Roy said, “One good thing. Because she’s still here to tell us this, we know we make it back in one piece.”

  Brit the Elder said, “To be more precise, you know that I do.”

  7.

  The first morning of the quest was spent mostly in cold, miserable silence. Then, as predicted, they found the remains of another party that had been killed and devoured by wolves.

  Gary, speaking to nobody in particular, said, “Look at all this gore. How much time did that turd spend just making this all look as realistic as he could?”

  Tyler, who just happened to be standing closest to Phillip at the time, said, “Maybe no time. Maybe he just brought in some people and had the wolves eat them.”

  Gary gasped. “It’s hard to believe he’d really do that.”

  Tyler asked, “What, kill someone just for
effect?”

  All four men spent the next several seconds not saying what they were thinking and trying their hardest not to think what they were thinking.

  As they approached, the corpses faded out of existence, leaving behind pristine weapons, wineskins full of presumably potable water, and folded clothing items. The men picked through the loot with no enthusiasm.

  The path was narrow, with a sheer drop on one side and a rock wall on the other. The ill-fated party had clearly been attacked by wolves from both sides. Stains on the wall and ground marked the place where they had gone down, but the leavings were scattered along the trail for dozens of feet in both directions. Furs, cloaks, bedrolls, backpacks, swords, shields, and daggers were collected and put into separate piles. Tyler found a pair of leather leggings and a buckskin shirt. Tyler glanced at Jimmy, who, unlike the others, was barefoot and wearing only thin pajamas.

  Tyler had more reason to hate Jimmy than anyone. Back when Jimmy was still called Merlin and was the chairman of the wizards, he had gotten a terrible idea. Like all truly terrible ideas, it had seemed like a great idea right up until the moment he told someone else about it. He tried to bring Tyler in on his schemes. When Tyler refused to be a party to it, Jimmy kept him quiet by “ghosting” him. Tyler spent days invisible, insubstantial, and unable to communicate, which would have been bad enough if he also hadn’t spent the entire time experiencing the sensations of starving, dying of thirst, suffocating, and having to go to the bathroom. The whole time he was suffering this, he could see his friends going on about their lives, wondering where he was. He was right there with them, suffering the torments of hell and knowing that it was Jimmy who did it to him.

  Tyler cleared his throat. Jimmy looked up. Tyler threw him the clothing. Jimmy caught it clumsily. When he saw what he had, his face lit up.

  He looked back to Tyler and said, “Thank you.”

  Tyler scowled and turned his attention away from Jimmy’s gratitude and back to the more pleasant topic of corpse robbing.

  Soon they were on the move again. Phillip, Tyler, and Gary wore furs and cloaks over their robes and street clothes. Jimmy wore the britches and shirt Tyler had found, along with some boots that the former owner no longer needed. All carried swords, shields, and daggers. The backpacks were used to carry the other useful items they’d looted, including a flint. Jimmy’s boots were too loose, but he knew better than to complain. Nobody in this group would have much sympathy.

  They had only been carrying weapons for less than an hour when they got their first opportunity to use them. The path up the mountain remained a narrow track with a sheer rock wall on the left side and a sickening plunge on the right. They rounded a corner and found a large mountain wolf blocking their path.

  Phillip was walking in the lead and stopped in his tracks when he saw the wolf. It had dark gray fur, yellow eyes, and paws the size of catchers’ mitts. It was one hundred pounds of tense muscle and anger. Their eyes locked for an instant; then the wolf leapt for Phillip’s jugular.

  Luckily, Phillip’s luck being what it is, Gary was walking behind Phillip and was not paying attention. He walked into Phillip’s back, causing Phillip to fall forward unexpectedly onto his hands and knees. Nobody was more surprised than the wolf. Instead of biting Phillip’s throat, it landed clumsily on his back as he hunched over. Gary let out a startled yelp. The wolf quickly got its footing and leapt off Phillip’s back, now trying for Gary’s throat instead.

  Gary instinctively shielded his face with his right arm, shrieking as he did so. Gary was grateful for the thick fur-covered hide that took the worst of the wolf’s bite. Even with the hide, he felt like his arm was being crushed in a vise. The wolf’s weight pulled him forward. Gary kept to his feet. As the wolf continued its vigorous assault on Gary’s arm, Phillip came to his senses, stood up, and shoved the wolf’s rear in the general direction of the cliff. Gary spun to his right, swinging the wolf out over the edge like some deranged carnival ride for animals. Gary barely managed to keep his footing, avoiding being pulled off the cliff to his death. The wolf kept his grip on his arm, so as Gary spun, the wolf swung around and hit a very startled Tyler in the side of the head.

  Tyler was knocked sideways into the rock wall on his left. The wolf fell to the ground and struggled to regain its footing on the narrow path. It got all four paws underneath it just in time to receive one of Jimmy’s too-large boots in the side of its head.

  The wolf rolled sideways off the edge of the path. They watched as the wolf tumbled, then fell, then tumbled some more, then fell some more, then grew too distant to follow.

  Gary said, “Wow. Good thing we have these swords.”

  They hiked in relative silence for the rest of that day. The path remained narrow, precarious, and littered with the occasional angry wolf. After the third wolf blocked their path and attacked Phillip, he insisted that it was someone else’s turn to lead while he brought up the rear. The next wolf somehow attacked from behind, but by this point, Phillip had gotten the hang of waiting for them to leap, then pushing them off the cliff while they were in midair. All the others agreed: you wouldn’t want to mess with Phillip if you were both standing on a cliff. He had become the master of death by shoving.

  After a day that felt years long, the path widened into a stand of trees inhabiting a relatively horizontal spot on the side of the mountain. They decided to camp for the night. Jimmy was surprisingly adept at building the fire.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” Phillip asked.

  Jimmy replied, “I spent thirty years living on a bicycle. It’s not like it had a kitchen and central heat.” He made a point of smiling as he said it. They had accepted his apology, but none of the wizards had truly forgiven, and they certainly hadn’t forgotten. There were certain things he could never do if he wanted to ever regain their trust, and chief among them was that he could never express any anger over their punishment of him.

  Phillip and Jimmy tended to the fire, or, to be more precise, Jimmy tended to the fire and Phillip kept an eye on Jimmy. Tyler and Gary fought and killed another wolf, which had slunk out of the underbrush and attacked Gary with no provocation, again, leaping straight at Gary’s throat. Gary shielded his face and fell over backward with the wolf riding him to the ground. While the wolf was distracted trying to kill Gary, Tyler came from the side and skewered it clumsily with his sword.

  Tyler shook his head. “These wolves. They all seem to attack the same way.”

  Phillip said, “That’s because they’re all the same wolf. I suspected it on the trail, but now I’m sure. Todd just has one wolf, and he keeps generating it over and over again. They all look exactly the same, are the same size, and attack the same way. They see you. They hunker down. They growl for a three count, and they leap at your head. Then, if you time it right, you can just shove them right off the mountain.”

  Gary looked down at the dead wolf and said, “Ah. Cool.”

  “Yeah,” Tyler agreed. “Guess we shouldn’t let this one go to waste.” Tyler reached down to grab the wolf’s carcass and was surprised when his hand went right through it. As they watched, the wolf corpse slowly faded away into nothing, leaving behind a small wrapped package marked “Wolf Jerky.”

  “Oh yeah,” Tyler said. “Todd’s a game designer.”

  “That’s standard in later video games, is it?” Phillip asked. “In games from my time, when things die, they just kind of explode.”

  “Yeah,” Gary said, “In lots of our games stuff still explodes, but that doesn’t make sense for a sword-and-sorcery game. It wouldn’t seem natural to stab a wolf and have it explode.”

  “But fading out does seem natural?” Jimmy asked.

  Tyler said, “Kinda. Not really. Look, the thing is, they learned fairly early on that players enjoyed killing stuff, but didn’t enjoy being reminded that they had killed stuff. Also, it was easier on the computer if it did
n’t have to keep drawing all the guys you’ve killed. Having them disappear frees up the processor to render the stuff you haven’t killed yet. Speaking of which, I’m hungry.” Tyler opened the package of wolf jerky and tried a piece.

  “How is it?” Phillip asked.

  “Awful,” Tyler said with his mouth full.

  “Figures,” Phillip said. “Give me some.”

  Gary asked, “If Todd’s trying to punish us, why would he give us food?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want us to starve to death too early into the quest,” Phillip said through a mouthful of jerky. “Or, maybe he figures making it easy to get something awful to eat will guarantee that we’ll eat something awful.”

  Tyler handed a piece to Gary and another to Jimmy, who looked at it and asked, “What if it’s poisoned?”

  Phillip said, “If he were going to poison us, he’d have poisoned the water, or just shot us with a dart. No, this is all about prolonging the suffering.”

  Jimmy shrugged and bit off a piece of the jerky.

  Tyler said, “If we get too tired of the jerky I can try to hunt for something, but I doubt there are any real animals here, so I’m afraid it’s jerky or nothing.”

  “You know how to hunt?” Jimmy asked.

  “I used to go with my dad,” he explained.

  Gary said, “I didn’t know black guys hunted.”

  Tyler laughed. “In Montana, we do.”

  The sky grew darker, the fire grew brighter, they sat, and, predictably, the conversation turned to Jeff.

  “Guys,” Gary asked, “what do you think the chances are that Todd was faking us out and Jeff’s still alive?”

  Jimmy said, “Low. Pretty much nonexistent. I mean, it’s possible, but we have to assume he’s gone. Even if we think he might be alive, we have to assume he’s not. You heard Todd. He killed him to prove a point. It does him no good if he pops up later and says, ‘I was just kidding.’ No, we have to assume that he killed one of us and that he’d be happy to do it again.”