“I just figured it was the Indian version of the game. They did such a good job recreating all the creatures from the stories I’d heard as a girl that it made sense. But when no one on the message boards knew what I was talking about I started to suspect something was wrong.”
“Why didn’t you contact tech support?” Ranjeet hated himself for even asking the question.
Daru stopped and turned to him, “Maybe I was waiting for tech support to contact me.”
Ranjeet’s heart beat faster in the light of Daru’s smile. He fought for moisture in his mouth, but his tongue stuck and refused to produce words.
She started walking again. “Besides,” she continued, “I’ve been having so much fun!”
Whether they were waiting for her to finish talking or just enjoyed irony, Ranjeet never knew. Pishacha boiled out of the palm forest, their red eyes piercing the dimness of the woods. Daru raised her shield and axe and bodily shoved the Pishacha away from her before assuming a more traditional fighting stance.
Ranjeet took his cue from her and pulled back the handle on his crossbow until the string clicked into its catch. His shaking hands caused the first bolt to drop to the ground, but the second one slid into its track. Ranjeet lifted the weapon and saw Daru casually behead one of the slavering demons with a forehand stroke of her axe. On the backswing she caved in the ribcage of another. Ranjeet looked for a target and found one farther away. The Pishacha hissed at Ranjeet as he pulled the trigger on his crossbow. The bolt flew true and straight, exactly where Ranjeet had been aiming. The Pishacha crumpled to the ground with fletchings sprouted from between its eyes. In the time it took Ranjeet to reload, Daru had dispatched another three demons. The rest thought better of their odds and fled.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She didn’t respond with anything but a deep, full belly laugh.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”
Daru wiped demon-blood from her axe onto mossy turf. “Were those the monsters you met in the real world?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve fought them enough in here to know that I wouldn’t want to fight them out there.”
“You must hurry,” a new voice came from behind Ranjeet. He spun and fired his crossbow, lodging the bolt deep into the trunk of a date palm. “Hold! I am not a foe.”
Daru pointed her axe at the man standing before them. His graying hair and sage demeanor caused her to lower her blade slightly. He lifted his hands to show that they held no weapons. A guitar was slung across his back.
“I am Thomas Rimer—”
Ranjeet interrupted, “RhymeTom?”
The man smiled. “One and the same. But that is of little import now; you are here and must make haste. The king will select his vessel and so become one himself. All things are connected if one pulls on enough strings, but the end of string pulling is, inevitably, unraveling.”
“What in the names of the gods are you talking about?” Daru raised her axe again, level with Thomas’ neck.
Ranjeet pushed her weapon aside. “Don’t you get it? It’s a riddle. We need to find the king and his vessel before everything comes unraveled.”
Thomas bowed low, rose, and then winked at Ranjeet before disappearing.
“All right,” Daru grumbled, “I haven’t seen anything like that before. Who was that?”
“I’m not sure, but he told me I needed to get into the game tonight. He must know something.”
“It would sure have been nice if he’d decided to share what he knew. How are we supposed to solve riddles and fight demons?”
“One thing at a time,” Ranjeet said, “Take me to the king.”
* * *
To say Daru was good at dispatching Pishacha would be akin to saying that Mozart was good at writing catchy tunes. She mowed through them, she demolished them, she ripped them apart while laughing in sheer delight. But they kept coming. Ranjeet did his best to pick off attacking demons, but the trees protected Pishacha from his crossbow more often than not, leaving Daru to do most of the killing and Ranjeet to stand in awe of her prowess.
Demons just kept coming. They poured out of every shadow or crevasse or hidden swale. None of them could hope to stop Daru, but they didn’t seem to care. Each one leapt at her with as much bloodlust as the one before.
“Why do they keep coming? They can’t stop… you.” Ranjeet had almost said, “us” before he caught himself.
Daru slashed open another Pishacha before answering, “I don’t know. ”
Ranjeet suddenly understood. “They’re slowing us down! We have to hurry!”
He took off running and was a dozen paces down the path before he realized he had no idea where the king was and little chance of defending himself against the hordes of demons closing in. He turned to see Daru jogging after him, pausing only long enough to behead a demon that dared approach.
Ranjeet breathed a sigh and turned to continue toward the king when he saw a Pishacha standing in front of him. The demon spread its clawed hands wide and narrowed its red eyes as it prepared to leap.
Daru was too far behind, Ranjeet had forgotten to load his crossbow, and even if he’d had the weapon at the ready, he wasn’t a very good shot. The Pishacha leapt. Ranjeet flinched. But when he felt the claw-stroke he screamed and tackled the demon, driving his shoulder into its chest and the demon into the hard-packed earth. It whimpered as its ribs cracked under Ranjeet’s weight, but it didn’t stop fighting until Daru’s axe finished it.
She dragged him to his feet. “Maybe let me take the lead,” she smiled.
He smiled back and Daru led them, at a much faster pace, stopping occasionally to dispatch a demon or two. As they stepped into the glade where King Mahabali held court, all the pursuing Pishacha stopped and fled.
Before them stood the king, just as Ranjeet recalled him from the drawings and parades of his youth. His large, ornate crown was shaded by a straw parasol clasped in his left hand. His broad face and enormous black mustache amplified his smile into a full grin. His large belly was only partially covered by necklaces and decorated cloth draped around his neck. On the ground around the king were intricate geometric arrangements of flower petals.
Ranjeet ran up to the king, shouted his name, and waved his hands before the royal face, but he did not move.
“What… what happened?” Ranjeet and Daru spun to see someone who looked almost exactly like King Mahabali emerge from shimmering air over one of the flower patterns.
“Who are you?” Ranjeet asked.
The newcomer looked around and then over at the king, “I… I’m Samir. How did…”
The tittering laughter of Puck drifted through the glade before the fairy appeared. “The vessel is here, so the king is not,” Puck said. “The thread is pulled; soon all will come unraveled!”
Before Ranjeet could ask any question, Pishacha erupted from the trees at the edge of the glade and leapt, one after another, into not-king Samir and disappeared.
“I think I’ve got it,” Ranjeet said, “They’re using the king to get into the real world. Puck told me that the Pishacha were trying to get out. Somehow they’re using Samir and King Mahabali to do it.”
“What do we do?”
“Uh…” Ranjeet stared at her as more and more Pishacha entered the real world. “Do you feel that?”
“No.”
“It feels like… hold on,” Ranjeet pulled on his face, in the game, but in Daru’s house in the real world, he tugged back one side of the Full-D system’s headgear and looked at both the game world and the real world at the same time. In the real world Amit was standing over him with a worried expression on his face.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
Ranjeet looked down at his arm and saw a ragged, bloody scratch across his arm where the Pishacha had clawed at him. That piece of information didn’t startle him as much as it confirmed what he already suspected. The real world and the game world were connected.
“Ami
t, I—”
“I’ve gotten the gist of things, how do we stop them?”
Ranjeet looked at him in the real world and Daru in the game world. Both of them wanting answers he wasn’t sure he had. He thought about Thomas Rimer’s riddle. Pulling on strings would make things come unraveled. What could that mean? He always addressed loose strings by cutting them off. Something about that didn’t seem right, so he defaulted to his tech support training.
“Amit, I need you to reboot the servers.”
Daru and Amit both swore at Ranjeet simultaneously.
“No, I think it will work. Go to the office and log in under my name. Tell tier-two that something big is happening and that if they don’t reboot the servers, it’ll destroy the entire game.”
“That’s just—”
“I know it’s crazy, but we have to do something or those things will be everywhere. Go. Tell them it’s a virus.”
“Why your login?” Amit asked.
“Because I don’t want you to lose your job, too,” Ranjeet said as he scribbled down his information. After Amit ran out the door, Ranjeet pulled the headgear down over his face completely and looked at Daru.
“Now we have to figure out how to fight this from the inside.”
* * *
Ranjeet and Daru had been slaughtering Pishacha for what felt like hours. They stood in front of Samir and killed every Pishacha they could. But the demons ignored them. Some, maybe even most, they killed, but more kept getting past. They couldn’t surround Samir so there were always gaps.
Ranjeet knew he was dripping sweat in the real world, as well as in game, but he couldn’t stop. He had long since run out of bolts for his crossbow and throwing knives from his brace, so Daru gave him her short sword. He was as inept with that as he was with the crossbow, but still he fought. It helped that Pishacha weren’t attacking him, but he knew he was still letting through more than Daru.
Ranjeet was about to give up when the world flickered. That’s the only way he could describe it. Everything in existence dimmed for an instant, got much brighter, and then returned to normal. That must have been the reboot, but Pishacha still came. Ranjeet knew then that they had lost. The reboot had failed; they couldn’t stop the demons. That made him angry and the anger made him fight even harder.
He was shouting incoherently and slashing wildly at demons when a wreath of fire enveloped him. Ranjeet shouted—or more accurately screamed like a frightened child—and jumped back. Only after his initial fright did he realize that the flame wasn’t consuming him. It formed a bright wall between him and the Pishacha. Daru lowered her axe and gave him a questioning look. All Ranjeet could do was gasp for air and shrug. They still heard Pishacha outside the flames howling and shouting in their harsh language, but no more came through.
Ranjeet had rested just enough to start growing curious about his involuntary confinement when a hole opened in the sheet of flames. Through it stepped a beautiful, blonde mage in a long, blue gown wielding a staff. Ranjeet didn’t recognize her, but from the gasp he heard behind him, Daru did.
“You’re…” Daru could barely get the words out, but she was speaking in Hindi so the mage gave her a quizzical look and shrugged.
Ranjeet assumed, from her pale skin and light hair, that she would speak English, so he attempted to translate. “Thank you for rescuing us. My… uh, friend seems to know who you are, but I don’t know that we’ve ever met. I’m Ranjeet Nagar and this is Daru Padmanabhan. We’re here to—”
“You seem like you’re here to destroy the barrier between the realms. I’m Jennet. Jennet Carter.” She said her name as if it held a great deal of importance. Ranjeet shrugged and translated for Daru.
“She’s the daughter of one of the game’s creators!” Daru said.
Ranjeet turned back to Jennet, “I’m sorry, Ms. Carter, I didn’t know who you were. I work for VirtuMax in technical support. I found a… well I discovered that…”
Jennet’s stern expression slid away into a half-smile. “It’s okay. I know something about what you’re dealing with, but I’ve never been to this place. Tell me what’s going on.”
So Ranjeet recounted the discovery of the emails, the Pishacha, and his warnings from Puck and Thomas Rimer. It was the mention of Rimer that really caught Jennet’s attention. Before that she seemed skeptical, but the invocation of the bard’s name seemed to confirm Ranjeet’s tale.
“So you tried to reboot the servers to stop the Pishacha from getting through?” Jennet summed up Ranjeet's plan. “But you didn’t know about all the redundancies that we’ve built in. The other servers just took up the load. Well, I guess it’s a good thing you tried or I wouldn’t have known exactly where to come.”
“Thank you,” Ranjeet said after translating for Daru, “I don’t know how long we could have held out. As it is, we don’t know how to stop this.”
“How long does the festival of…”
“Onam,” Ranjeet supplied.
“Right, Onam, how long does it last?”
“It depends on where you are. Some rural places still celebrate for a month, but most celebrate for ten days. But the king only visits for four days.”
Jennet shook her head, “We can’t hold them off for four days. Have you tried talking to him?”
“We tried, but he didn’t respond at all. He didn’t even look at us. Samir,” Ranjeet gestured to the reenactor, “can talk to us, but he doesn’t seem to know where he is or what he’s doing.”
“The Dark Queen has tried this before,” Jennet said. “She wants a gateway between the worlds and needs to find a weak place to open it. Since King Mahabali is already going through, the place is weak, and Samir’s soul seems to be the doorway.”
“Ranjeet,” Daru asked, “What’s going on?”
He translated for her.
“What if we can find Samir’s body?” Daru mused, “If Samir is here in India maybe the king is in his body.”
Ranjeet translated that to Jennet.
“It might work. I can hold off the Pishacha for a few hours at least. You can go and find Samir in the real world.”
Ranjeet turned to the man they’d been defending. “Samir, where are you from?”
“I’m from…” he looked around wildly, “Kerala.”
“Kerala’s a big place, Samir,” Daru spoke to him this time. “What city are you from? Where is the parade you’re supposed to be walking in?”
“I’m, uh, supposed to be in Thrikkakkara. Where am I, what is this place?”
“That’s about a half-hour drive,” Daru said
Ranjeet turned to Jennet, “He wants to know where he is. What should I tell him?”
Jennet looked at the nervous man and then back to Ranjeet, “Tell him he’s where King Mahabali resides. That’s true enough. Then you both need to get back to the ring and log out.”
When they were ready Jennet opened another hole in the flames. The Pishacha saw it and called to each other in their own language.
“Run!” Jennet shouted.
The first steps out of the king’s glade were bought with much violence. Daru lay about with her axe, driving the Pishacha away from them. Ranjeet continued to use her short sword to hack at the demons that escaped Daru. By the time they reached the edge of the forest, the Pishacha seemed to forget about them and instead redoubled their efforts to get through to Samir. Jennet’s fire held, but with each demon that jumped into the flames, the blaze waned. She would not be able to hold out indefinitely. They hurried back to the beach and the ring of polished stones where they’d entered the game. At most, they had a few hours to find one man in an entire parade during the most celebrated holiday in the country.
* * *
They jumped into Daru’s grav-car. A quick search on his tablet, and Ranjeet keyed in the location of the Thrikkakkara parade. Daru drove with reckless speed through the streets of Kochi and beyond. Ranjeet wanted to talk to her, he wanted to apologize for his father’s dishonor, he wanted so many
things, but he didn’t dare to distract her as she deftly wove her expensive car between busses, people, animals, and other cars.
Ranjeet stared out the window and worried. How could they possibly find one Mahabali reenactor in a whole parade filled with people, many of whom were dressed as the fabled king? But as Daru pulled the car as close as possible to the parade route, Ranjeet stopped worrying about how they were going to find Samir’s body, and instead worried about how they were going to fight through the Pishacha that were attacking the crowd.
He didn’t stop to think about the fact that he was no longer in a game, that he had no weapons, and he likely would suffer the same fate as the people screaming around him. He just ran forward and shouted a battle cry at the nearest demons. He raised his hands to attack and nearly dropped the crossbow that he found himself holding.
Ranjeet skidded to a halt just a few meters in front of the Pishacha who held an elderly man pinned to the street. Though the puzzle of the crossbow in his hands nagged at him, he ignored it and instead loaded a bolt and leveled the weapon at the demon’s chest. It looked at him with undisguised malevolence and bit off harsh words in its awful tongue. Without waiting, Ranjeet pulled the trigger and sent a bolt through the body of the Pishacha. It crumpled to the ground and then disappeared into a cloud of purple-black smoke that wafted parallel to the ground as if pulled along by a string.
Ranjeet stooped to retrieve his bolt before turning to see Daru, with an axe in her own hand, chopping the limbs off of another Pishacha. It too evaporated as it died and the vapors followed the path of the first.
“Do you think…” Ranjeet started the thought.
“…they’ll lead us to Samir!” Daru finished.
Together they took off running after the spirit-corpses of the Pishacha, but they were outpaced by the smoke. It seemed to accelerate as it drifted closer to its goal. Soon they lost the trail in the twisting streets. Ranjeet swore in frustration, but Daru kept trotting in the same direction they’d last seen the Pishacha-smoke going. A scream sounded to their left, and she broke into a full run; Ranjeet followed. Daru found another demon tearing into the flesh of a parade goer. She lopped off its head before it even knew she was there, and its spirit rose, leading Ranjeet and Daru toward the king.
Chronicle Worlds: Feyland Page 26
