The Deadliest Game

2

The tavern had only one room, and its roof was leaking. The rain, which was falling softly and steadily outside, was coming in through a bare place in the thatch, dripping morosely on the cracked slate hearth of the fireplace, and hissing and steaming where it hit. Smoke from the badly vented fireplace was rolling around, blue as smog, underneath the blackened rafters. A few sputtering lamps hung from those rafters, their light swimming in the smoke, some of the light actually making its way down to the ancient, massive, knife-scarred wooden tables underneath.

At those tables sat a motley assortment of people, eating and drinking: peasant farmers in from the fields, nobles ostentatiously sitting on their folded-up cloaks so that they wouldn’t have to physically touch the benches, mercenary soldiers in scarred leather armor, well-dressed foreign merchants talking animatedly among themselves about the Sarxonian investment markets and how the present wars would affect them; in other words, the usual Moons-day night crowd at the Pheasant and Firkin, everyone swilling down herbdraft or gahfeh or the host’s watered (but fortunately unleaded) wine, eyeing one another suspiciously and having a good time.

In the chimney-corner there was even the obligatory dark, hooded stranger with his feet up on one massive firedog, smoking a long pipe, his eyes glittering from under the hood as he watched the company. A large dingy-white cat with ragged ears and one eye gone milky-blind walked past the stranger, glancing at him, said, “Huh. You again…” and kept on walking.

Leif Anderson, sitting at the far side of the tavern, alone at a small table near the door, looked around the tavern and thought absently that, in a way, it was the kind of place his mother had always warned him about. The problem was that, in her more protective moods, she was worried that he might stumble into a place like this in the real world, and he very much doubted that there were any: at least, not where he was likely to run into them, in New York or D.C. Outer Mongolia, possibly, or the Outer Hebrides, or the Yukon maybe. He smiled slightly. It always amused him when someone as tough as his mother, who had danced for years for the New York City Ballet, and therefore had a physique like spring steel and a tongue like a razor, got all worried about her “little boy”—as if he had not inherited any of that toughness himself.

The innkeeper loomed over him suddenly. “You using that other chair?” he said. He was an archetype, just as much as the guy by the fireplace: fat, balding, wearing an apron that had apparently last been washed before the present Dragon cycle began, and in perpetually foul temper.

Leif looked up. “I’m waiting for someone,” he said.

“Great,” the innkeeper said, grabbing the spare chair with one hand. “When he turns up, you can have another chair. I need this for the paying customers.”

Leif picked up the tankard of herbdraft he had been nursing and waved it meaningfully at the innkeeper.

“Tough,” the innkeeper said. “You want another chair, you pay for another drink.” He started to laugh at his own alleged wit, exhibiting teeth like something from a dentist’s horror novel.

“It is unwise,” Leif said, “to insult a wizard.”

The innkeeper looked him over with a sneer, plainly unimpressed by what he saw — a slender young man in a somewhat ragged robe decorated with faded and obscure alchemical and magical symbols. “You’re nothing but a hedgie,” the innkeeper scoffed. “What’re you going to do? Not leave a tip?”

“No,” Leif said mildly, “I’ll give you a tip.” He pulled off his hat, fumbled around in it for a moment, and then came up with what he had been looking for. He threw it at the innkeeper, and said one word under his breath.

The innkeeper caught it by reflex — stared, for a moment, at what looked like a piece of rag tied up with string — and then got a startled expression. From nowhere, a puff of smoke appeared and wrapped itself around him. All around the inn, heads turned.

The smoke slowly cleared. Where the innkeeper had been standing, there was now a small white mouse sitting on the floor, looking around it in shock.

Leif leaned down and picked up the wrapped-up talisman from beside it. “Even hedge-wizards,” he said, “know some spells. That a good enough tip?” And he glanced under the next table before looking back at the mouse. “Have a nice day.”

The mouse turned to see what had caught Leif’s attention…and saw the beat-up white cat walking toward him with an expression that suggested it was ready for a predinner snack.

The mouse ran off across the cracked and worn flagstones of the floor, with the cat heading after it, not really hurrying, just enjoying the prospect of its hors d’oeuvre.

The other patrons of the inn turned away, not too concerned about this, since the innkeeper’s daughter, totally unconcerned, had begun making the rounds and taking drink orders. Leif tucked his talisman away and sat back with his drink again, his attention distracted once more by the sound of the foreign merchants discussing the futures markets.

Here as in the real world, there was a hot trade among the merchants in hog-belly futures, and Leif had no trouble imagining his father sitting right here with these guys and talking margins and short-sells until the cows, or the hogs, came home.

I really should try to get him in here sometime, Leif thought idly. We might be able to make some “money.” His father’s talent with investments, though, kept him hopping all over the planet, physically as well as virtually: so much so that he pretty much refused to spend his scarce leisure time anywhere virtual, or doing anything that sounded even slightly like “talking shop.” If I could get him in here, he’d probably much rather be some kind of berserk warrior in a loincloth. Anything to get out of a suit….

Leif’s attention was momentarily attracted by another of the patrons across the room, a tall, lean, intent young man in a dark jerkin who was methodically checking and clearing a gun, some kind of semiautomatic with a Glock in its ancestry. Normally one might have expected this to cause some stir, but the Pheasant and Firkin was located in the little princedom of Elendra, and Elendra was one of the places in Sarxos where gunpowder didn’t work. It didn’t work in most places in Sarxos, actually. The creator of the game had been making his alternate world mostly for those who preferred strictly mechanical weapons, preferably the kind that meant you and your enemy had to get up close and personal to kill one another.

But Chris Rodrigues had also apparently suspected that there would always be those for whom life would not be complete without weapons that went BANG, the more frequently and the more loudly the better, and for them, Sarxos had the adjacent countries of Arstan and Lidios, where explosives and other chemical-based weaponry were enabled. They were noisy places, featuring frequent wars with high body counts. Many Sarxonians made it a point to avoid Arstan and Lidios entirely, reasoning that it was better to let the boys and girls who were inclined that way just get on with what made them happy, and not distract or upset them with annoying visions of a world where people did business differently.

Apparently these visions did bother some players a little, for there were frequent attempts to find some explosive or gunpowder-analogue that would work in the rest of Sarxos as well, despite the game creator’s insistence that there was no such substance, nor would there be. Some players — aspiring alchemists, or would-be weapons dealers — would occasionally spend prolonged periods trying to invent such a substance. They tended to have accidents that were hard to explain except by an old Sarxonian saying: “The Rules take care of themselves.”

The black cast-iron handle of the door near Leif turned. The door creaked open, swinging toward him and hiding his view. The patrons stopped what they were doing and stared — they would always do that, even if the person coming in was someone they knew. But it plainly wasn’t, this time. They kept on staring.

The person who had come in now turned and shut the door. Medium height, slim build, long brown hair tied back tight and braided up around her head: dark clothes, all somber colors — brown tunic, black breeches and boots, a tight dark-brown leather jerkin over it all, dark-brown leather bands cross-binding the breeches, a dark brown robe over it all, divided up the back for riding, and a brown leather pack. If she was armed, Leif couldn’t see where…not that that meant anything.

She looked around long enough to complete her part of the staring game — for it was a game. You had to meet the crowd’s eyes, let them know that you had as much right to be here as they did…otherwise there would be trouble, trouble that you might or might not start, but would definitely finish. The patrons of the Pheasant and Firkin, perceiving this, became elaborately uninterested in the new arrival.

She looked over at Leif. He lifted his hat again, enough to let her see the red hair.

She smiled and came over, sat down in the other chair, and looked around her with a wry expression.

“You come here often?” she said.

Leif rolled his eyes at the tired old line.

“No, I mean it seriously. This place is an utter dive. How’d you find it?”

Leif chuckled. “I stumbled in last year, during the wars. It has a certain rural charm, don’t you think?”

“It has mice,” Megan said, pulling her feet back a little and looking under the table at something that ran by. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, here comes the cat….”

Leif chuckled. “You want something to drink? The tea’s not bad.”

“In a while. I take it you got the list from Winters.”

“Yup…a few days ago.” Leif pushed the tea-tankard away from him and sat looking thoughtful. “Parts of it surprised me. Problem is, if I knew those people at all, I knew most of them by their game-names and not by real-world names — otherwise maybe I would have caught on sooner. Probably a lot of people would have. But what’s plain right away is that all the people ‘bounced’ were very active players. No dillies.” Leif used the Sarxos term for “dilettantes,” people who played the Game less often than once a week. “And as far as I can tell, no ‘minor’ characters. All the people who got bounced were movers and shakers of one kind or another.”

Megan nodded. She apparently had noticed this, too. But she looked at him a little cockeyed. “A few days ago? I would have thought you’d want to get started looking around here right away.”

“Oh, I did.” Leif grinned at her. “But I wanted to do the first few pieces of groundwork on my own. If it turned out to be a waste of time, well, it was my time, not both of ours.”

“Oh. Okay. So where’d you go for your groundwork?”

“Up north, mostly.” Sarxos had two main continents, one north, one south. From the northerly one a great archipelago reached down in “the Crescent” toward the southern, making thousands of suitable havens for pirates, rebels, and those who wanted to take a few weeks off from the business of gaming to work on their virtual tans. “I was talking with a few people,” Leif said. “One of them was a guy whose game-name was Lindau.”

“Lindau as in the storming of the Inner Harbor?” said Megan.

“Yup. Not that he’s been storming much of anything since he was bounced. Also I had a chat with Erengis, who was Lindau’s archenemy for so long. She’s a regular gossip shop on two legs.” Leif stretched, glancing under the nearby table. “And I talked to a few other people who were enemies of Shel’s, or some of the other bounced people; and some of their friends.”

He must have looked a little smug, to judge by the expression on Megan’s face. “Right,” she said. “And did one particular name come up at all? Several times, in fact?”

Leif smiled slightly. “You’re there before me.”

“Argath,” said Megan.

Leif nodded.

Argath was the king of Orxen, one of the more northerly countries, a place mountainous and short on resources, except for large numbers of barbarians clad in beast-skins — people who loved to go to war at a moment’s notice. The place had earned itself the cognomen “The Black Kingdom” because of a tendency over many game-years to side with the Dark Lord during his periodic risings. Yet somehow it never itself got overrun, a cause of considerable annoyance and envy to some other players.

Argath had insinuated himself into the kingship of Orxen over the last game-decade by means that were considered normal in Sarxos. He had made a name for himself as an effective general of the Orxenian forces during the period of rule of a weak and ineffective king. No one was terribly surprised when elderly King Laurin apparently had an accident near his fishpond late one night, and was found in the morning head down among the bemused koi by his body-servants, several hours drowned. No one was surprised when the murder failed to be pinned on anyone specific; and no one was surprised when Argath was elected king by acclamation, the unfortunate King Laurin having outlived all his heirs.

Argath’s career after that had been unremarkable, by Sarxonian standards. He campaigned in the summer, like most people did, and intrigued during the winter, setting up agreements with other players, or weaseling out of them. He won battles, and lost them, but mostly he won: Argath was good at what he did. Shel had fought him a game-year or so previously, in the same kind of skirmish that Shel had had with Delmond, and Shel had won, which had surprised some of the locals. Argath’s army had been much bigger than Shel’s.

“And Argath,” Megan said, “is not a construct — not an artifact or built-in feature of the game.”

“No, he’s ‘live,’ I know,” Leif said. “Someone told me once what he does in real life. It sure looks kind of like Argath might have it in for anybody who had beat him in a fair fight.”

“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.

Minsar was several hundred years old, and had outgrown its walls twice. Around the outsides of the old granite-block walls was a more or less permanent town of tents and shanties, and the inevitable little crowd of industries too foul-smelling or dangerous to be allowed to do business inside the walls, like the tanners and papermakers and the bakers (like other cities, Minsar had discovered that, under the right conditions, flour could become a high explosive). Now, though, there was a new ring of tents and temporary structures outside the “outer ring”: the pavilion and wagons of the army that had defended Minsar, and the structures of several other groups of warriors, large and small, who had come there under the auspices of one lord or another to check the situation out.

Megan and Leif made their way toward the city gates through a maelstrom of noise and ferocious odors. Roasting meat, spilled wine, baking bread (the bakers were apparently working twenty-four hours a day to meet the increased demand), horses and horse dung, the stinking stagnant pools under the city walls, the occasional drift of perfume from some passing camp-follower or newly scrubbed-and-scented soldier just out of the bathhouses built outside the walls, all their smells wove together amid the sound of the many voices speaking or shouting in many languages, laughing, cursing, joking, talking. Leif and Megan listened to the talk as best they could as they made their way to and through the gates.

The gate-wardens were keeping only the slackest watch. The town was plainly still in holiday mood after being saved from being sacked by Delmond. Most of the talk around Leif and Megan, as they made their way down the cobbled open space of the main street, was about that: the narrow escape, the army suddenly without its leader, and what would happen to that army now.

“Where’d the knife go?” Leif said softly.

“Away,” Megan said.

“Good. Knives are illegal in here.”

“Don’t think anyone’ll be able to enforce the statute tonight,” Megan said, looking around at the hordes of armed men and women milling around, trying to get into the town-square taverns, or spilling out of them with drinks in hand. She found herself trying not to stare at one gaudily dressed hunchbacked dwarf who crossed her path, pushing his way through the crowd and waving a miniature sword, to the guffaws of others. “You want to try taking the swords off all these people? How many watchmen do you think there are in Minsar?”

“Tonight? Fewer than usual,” Leif said. “I take your point.”

They drifted past another crowd outside a tavern door. Inside was an impossible crowd, packed together like medieval sardines, shouting and pushing to get to the bar or to get away from it. A burly barmaid was pushing through the crowd with double handfuls of beer mugs, made not of glass or ceramic, but of leather, tarred inside. She was using the leather “jacks” as effective offensive weapons, and there was a small clear space around her as people backed off to avoid being splashed or trampled.

Leif drifted into the crowd outside the door and burrowed into it a little way, and Megan followed him. The rush of voices closed over her head like water over a swimmer.

“—don’t know why Ergen insists on coming in at night when it’s going to be the most crowded—”

“—get out of here—”

“—up in the big hall looking for Elblai, she didn’t stay there long, so I thought—”

“—too many idiots in here looking to get drunk and start a brawl, I wouldn’t—”

“—five malts and a burned-wine—”

Megan watched one of the earlier speakers head out of the crowd, followed by a couple of friends. She nudged Leif, and gestured him away.

He nodded, following her a little way out of the press. “It’s a pity they don’t have showers here,” he muttered. “I feel like I need one after that.”

“Hey, the night is young. Listen, I heard a name I know.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Elblai. See those guys? Going down that little lane. Come on.”

He looked around, located them in the crowd: two tall men, two smaller ones, and one who was very short indeed, heading off down a street which was more the size of an alley. Megan headed on after them.

Leif followed. “What did they say?”

“Just something that made me feel nosy.” She smiled slightly in the torchlit dimness. “When you spy long enough, you get hunches about what’s worth listening to. This could be something.”

Megan turned into the lane, with Leif behind her. The lane was no more than four feet wide, with shuttered doors and windows on both sides. “This isn’t a street,” Leif muttered, “it’s a walk-in closet.” Down at the end of the lane, one door was open a crack. The flicker of firelight streamed through it, and from inside came the mostly shut-in sound of more talk, laughter, shouting.

The door opened wider to let in the men who were ahead of Megan and Leif, then started to close again. Megan pushed forward to follow them before the door closed completely. She squeezed through, trying to make it look casual. Inside, there was a fireplace directly across from the door, and beside it a hatch leading through into the kitchen. The hatch had a broad sill with several pitchers of beer waiting on it, and as Megan and Leif came in, hands poked out through the hatch and handed a passing server a roast chicken on a plate. This was apparently a moderately classy place. Where other taverns might have had torches stuck in iron brackets in the walls, this one had real lamps, oil lamps with glass in them. On the old scarred tables scattered around there were rushlights, each rush clamped into a little iron holder and burning like a small smoky star. Most of the tables were full of people eating and smoking and drinking and talking.

Leif, behind Megan, nudged her, indicating an empty table off to one side, not too close to the one being taken by the men they had followed in, not too far away to make their conversation inaudible. Fortunately, the men seemed to have no concern about inaudibility. They shouted for the tavernkeeper, ordered wine, settled down around their table, and picked up their conversation more or less where it had left off.

“—just go away like that.”

“He got bounced. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, well, are they sure it’s genuine?”

“Oh, come on, whoever heard of anyone faking a bounce? I don’t think it can be done. The Rules.”

“Don’t know that there’s anything in the Rules against it,” said the smallest man, a fellow with a hawklike face and small wise eyes. “Might be an interesting new tactic. Vanish…then come back where you’re not expected.”

Megan was distracted as a tall slender woman stopped by their table and said, “Whaddayawant?”

“Your best honeydraft, good woman,” Leif said. “And for my companion—”

“Gahfeh, please,” Megan said. “Morstofian roast, thick cream, double sweet.”

The tall, slender woman tossed her long dark hair back and said, “No cream. Double sweet’s extra.”

“Oh, well, no cream, single sweet,” Megan said, resigned. The woman went away, making a face that suggested Megan’s sanity was in question for asking for extras.

“…think that’s a tactic I’d care to try,” said one of the men. “And it doesn’t sound like Shel either.”

“Oh, you know him well, do you?”

“No, but I hear the stories the same as everybody. If he—”

They broke off as the serving-woman came to their table, and there was a long digression mostly involving hot and cold drinks. Megan wasn’t interested in that, but she was interested in the reaction of some of the other people, warriors and merchants both, who were sitting near enough to hear what was going on. Some of them were leaning in the men’s general direction while trying to look as if they weren’t. When the serving-woman went away, the men to whom Megan had been listening had dropped their voices considerably. She frowned a little and became interested in her gahfeh, which had just arrived.

“Nasty theory,” Leif said under his breath.

“Sometimes people can’t stand believing what’s really happened,” Megan said. “They start rationalizing. I wish they’d mention that name again, is all.”

Leif shook his head, a “what’s-the-use” gesture. One of the men’s voices was growing louder. “—why we should be slumming it down here when the rest of them are up in the great hall.”

Megan found herself wishing that this were not a game, but some more mundane form of entertainment that you could simply turn up so as to hear better. “No way they’ll let us in there,” said the man the first one had addressed.

There was another pause as their drinks arrived. The first man lifted the leather jack with the ale he had ordered, and took a long swift drink from it. “Not us maybe, but all the big Players, they’re all gettin’ in. They can’t afford to piss anyone off up there tonight. Who knows who might turn up, not get in, go away angry…and turn up next week with five thousand people that nobody here’ll dare turn away? The city’s picking up the bill for executive entertainment tonight, I’ll bet. In their best interests. Tomorrow, who knows, they might run out of food and have an excuse to throw everyone out. But nobody’s gonna throw the big guys outa there, not tonight. Too many deals brewing.”

“Aah, what would you know about deals?”

“Oh, I know, all right.”

“Yeah, you’re Argath’s best buddy, I know all about it. That’s why you’re down here with the rest of us, drinking this watered stuff.”

There was laughter, and a growl that suggested that it might turn nasty if the others kept teasing its owner. Leif looked over at Megan.

“You heard a name? What name?” he said.

She told him.

“Well,” he said, “I think we just heard another one. Sounds like it might be worth a visit.”

“Yeah, sure, if we can find a way to sneak in there without getting tossed out on our ears.”

Leif looked thoughtful. Megan sat quiet for a few seconds — the chat at the other table had dropped out of audibility again as a couple of the men tried to calm down the one who had sounded ruffled — and then said very softly to Leif, “How good a hedge-wizard are you?”

He looked at her with slightly affronted professional pride. “Pretty good.”

“Want to do another transit?”

“What, from here? Miss a decimal place and we’ll both wind up inside a wall, and there go a couple of perfectly good characters. And this whole mission. No, thanks!”

“Okay. Can you do invisibility?”

Leif looked at her, slightly surprised. “Of course.”

“For two?”

He thought about that. “Not for long.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Just long enough to get us into the main hall where the bigwigs are having their meeting. After that we can hide behind a tapestry or something.”

“This is going to cost me points,” Leif said.

“It’s in a good cause. Oh, come on, Leif. I’ll transfer you some points to cover what we use! I’m not short of score myself.”

“Okay,” Leif said. “Let’s get as close as we can, though. The great hall here is where?”

“In the central keep, I’m pretty sure.”

As casually as they could, they finished their drinks, paid their bill, and headed out into the tiny lane, chatting in a way they hoped would sound normal. It was quiet people moving through the dark who would attract attention on a night like this. “If they’re both in there,” said Leif, “we’re in business.”

“If they are,” Megan said. They headed for the keep, a tall square stone structure that towered over the rear of the central marketplace-square.

Around its open front door were gathered what looked like part of several companies of bodyguards, drinking out of good metal cups and talking quietly while looking around them with at least some semblance of alertness. Most of them wore colored surcoats over their armor, and almost all of them had someone’s badge embroidered on the surcoat-breast. They looked at Megan and Leif with only mild interest as they passed by, heading for the shadows off to the side of the keep, where a narrow road ran deeper into the city. As Megan passed, she got the briefest glance through the big door of what was going on inside: a whirl of color, voices muttering and echoing off the room’s high ceiling, huge tapestries at the back of the room moving slightly in breezes from the high slit-windows they concealed.

Leif picked a spot just around the front corner of the keep, where the torchlight didn’t fall, and felt around in one of his pockets. “Game interaction,” he whispered to the air.

Megan felt the slight vibration in the air that told her the games computer was speaking to Leif so as not to be heard by anyone else. “Points transfer,” he said. “Invisibility. Locus for two.” He paused, and his eyebrows went up. He looked at Megan. “Do you know how much this is going to—”

“I don’t care, as long as it’s not more than three thousand,” she said, “because that’s about all the points I’ve got.”

“Oh, no, it’s only two hundred.”

“Fine. Game interaction,” she whispered.

“Listening,” said the computer softly in her ear.

“Transfer two hundred points to Leif.”

“Done.”

“Finished.”

“Okay,” Leif said. “You know how this works?”

“Generally.”

“Don’t get between anybody’s line of sight and a strong light source,” he said. “Fortunately, it’s going to be mostly just torches in there. Stay close to the walls, that’s the best way, and if you do have to cross in front of light, do it low. Keep your voice real low. The locus amplifies sound. And for Rod’s sake don’t bump into anybody.”

“Right.”

“Game intervention,” Leif said.

A brief silence. “Invisibility locus,” Leif said.

Suddenly everything was buzzing, and her skin itched. Megan looked around her. Everything else was normal, but when she lifted her hands in front of her eyes, she couldn’t see them.

She turned, and found that she couldn’t see Leif either. This was a side effect that she hadn’t quite anticipated for some reason. “Okay,” said his voice nearby, sounding unnaturally loud. “Look, I’m going to head in through the front door when the guards aren’t paying too much attention to the space between them, and there’s no one else going in or out. You do the same. Then I’ll make for the nearest hiding place on the right side. You do the same, but cut left. Circulate for a while. Then pick out the biggest tapestry in the place and get behind it. I’ll let the invisibility relax while we’re there — it’s a strain holding it too long.”

“Okay. But what if there’s somebody behind the biggest tapestry already?”

“Pick the next biggest. And pray it isn’t occupied, too.”

They made cautiously for the big front door. Megan had to dodge quickly a couple of times as people brushed past her, nearly touching her. She had to do it a few times more as she stood in front of the open door, waiting for her moment. But finally there came a period of a few seconds when no one was going in or out, and the soldiers guarding the door were both looking in opposite directions.

She slipped in, bumping against something she couldn’t see: Leif. It took her a moment to recover from the shock, and then she was through the door, ducking out of the way of an elegantly dressed nobleman who was coming right toward her. She held still just long enough to scan the room quickly. It was a nobly decorated place, for a chamber that had started out as just four bare walls and a lot of holes to put ceiling-joists in. Now there was a permanent ceiling, instead of the temporary one that would have been there when the keep was built strictly for defense. Tall white polished pillars had been installed down the length of the room. A large patterned red-and-blue carpet ran down the middle of the room, and the skins of various beasts, mostly sheepskins, were scattered over by the far walls, where the tapestries hung to cover the bare stone and keep the drafts out. In the center of the room, people were scattered all over, mostly in small knots of three or four, drinking and talking. Down at the end of the room, in front of the biggest tapestry, was a dais — one hardly worthy of the name, really. It only went up one step, and on it was a white chair. The chair was empty.

That chair spoke, possibly more eloquently than anything else, of the situation here. The city of Minsar had no real owner now: not since Shel was gone. Now its great hall was full of potential owners…people who were looking over the real estate on the assumption that its former owner might very well not come back — or might not come back in time to keep one of them from moving in — and some of whom were not what a real-estate agent would have called “time wasters.”

Megan looked around as she made her way cautiously over toward the left wall and pressed herself up against it to get her breath for a moment, and try to shake some of the buzzing out of her ears. She considered that there might be a bad time coming for Minsar. Unless the city could find itself a powerful protector, and soon, it would shortly find one or another of these people at its door, in front of an army, and the message being delivered would be: “Accept us as ‘protectors’…or lose what you’ve got.” There was a chance that its potential protector was somewhere in this crowd; that, Megan suspected, was why this party was being held. No city wanted to be on the outs with its new owner, or to be accused of having offered him or her inadequate hospitality, after the dust had settled.

She looked around the hall to determine which was the biggest tapestry. That was the one behind the throne: no way around it. At least no one seemed to be gathering there. A lot of people were looking at that throne, from a distance, but no one was going too near it. Maybe nobody wants to look too eager this early in the proceedings, Megan thought.

She stepped out cautiously and made her way slowly along the left-hand side of the hall toward the dais, listening carefully as she went. Up ahead of her was a big spread of food laid out on a U-shaped array of tables, and the noble guests were in the process of descending on the buffet as if they hadn’t eaten in days. Strolling among them, trying to look casual — or so Megan thought — was a man fairly plainly dressed in dark gray, but with a thick golden chain around his neck, its links the size of fists.

He was the mayor of the town, the only statutory authority left in Minsar now that Shel was missing. To Megan’s eyes, the man had a rather harried expression, despite his casual air; he was watching the guests with a look that suggested he wasn’t sure whether some kind of fight over his town might not break out right here. Fortunately, there was no sign of this. Megan looked around at the nobles and high-caste warriors eating and drinking Minsar’s food, and thought she saw people mostly intent on taking advantage of a good feed. What she didn’t see, though, was the kind of clustering or circling of people that suggested that someone really important was there. She had learned to look for such small status-oriented gatherings, having come to recognize them from the occasional cocktail party her mother and father hosted. The rule was that the most important person at a party inevitably became the center of such bunches, though the people in the “bunch” might cycle as the party went on. The other rule was that sooner or later, everybody ended up in the kitchen…though here, that was unlikely. The kitchen was strictly for the servants.

She passed as close to the buffet as she dared, listening hard, not daring to linger too close for fear someone should bump into her. It was dangerous business, invisibility. There were players who would react to feeling something they couldn’t see with a knife.

“—the salmon’s very nice—”

“—out of wine. Where is that girl? Place is shamefully understaffed—”

“—not worth my trouble, I think. It’s on the small side, and the squabbling has started already.”

“Oh?”

“Of course. Just look around you. Anybody who’s serious is off somewhere private, doing a deal. Though not with him, he’s out of the loop—”

The person speaking, some kind of duke or baron to judge by the small informal coronet, glanced at the mayor, smiled, glanced away again. He then came right around the table toward Megan, heading for where a small suckling pig was laid out.

She backpedaled hurriedly to get out of his way. The duke or baron turned his back on her and picked up a handy knife.

Megan got well out of range. There were people who could sense invisibility, and it was better to be cautious, especially around knives, which could fly out of someone’s hand without warning…as she knew very well. Megan moved as quietly as she could to the big tapestry behind the throne, and slipped behind it.

Well down behind it she could just see a Leif-shaped bulge in the tapestry. She assumed he could sense her here as well. He was carefully standing where the dais and tapestry would combine to keep anyone from seeing his feet. She moved down to join him.

“You see him out there?” she said.

“Huh — oh, it’s you. What?” Leif muttered.

“The mayor of the town,” she said. “Buttering up the dignitaries. Literally.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, get this off me for now. This buzzing is a nuisance. I can’t hear.”

“It’s spell artifact,” Leif said, and instantly it went away as he relaxed the spell. “No way to get rid of it without getting rid of the spell, too. If you insist—”

“Not a chance,” Megan said hurriedly. “I’m way underdressed for this crowd. And as for you, you look like you slept in a tree. Did you know that there’s straw sticking out of your wizard’s hat?”

“It’s for atmosphere,” Leif said, sounding slightly injured. “A hedge-wizard has to look like he’s been in a hedge recently.”

Megan snickered, for Leif had that aspect of his persona handled. “I’m going out once more,” she said. “But this is really a pain. You can make yourself invisible again if you want, but I’m tempted to mug one of the serving-women and take her clothes and just walk around with a wine pitcher. It’d be easier to hear.”

Leif raised his eyebrows. “It’s your call. Anything yet?”

“Nothing but a suggestion that anyone we’d be interested in hearing is probably somewhere else.”

Leif grunted. “I guess that’s no surprise. Still…I’ll meet you back here in a few minutes. You want the spell, or are you really going to mug that wench?”

She sighed. “The spell.” A moment later the buzzing in her ears was back, and Leif was nowhere in sight. “Thanks. See you in a bit.”

The tapestry billowed out slightly and he was gone. Megan went out the other side, watching most carefully where she walked. Invisibility was useful, but you had to have eyes in the back of your head, never knowing from what unexpected direction someone might approach, and it was very strange walking around without being able to see your feet.

She made for the buffet table again, and spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes becoming very adept at getting close to the food and the conversations without banging into anyone or getting banged into herself. She even started stealing food, very circumspectly. The salmon was very good, which was nice, since she was partial to it.

“—just about finished here, I think,” said a very simply dressed man in slashed and purfled midnight blue.

The elderly woman he was talking to, with beautiful silvery hair pulled back tight, wearing an ornate dress in black and silver, said, “Well, I suspect the place’s fate will be sorted out within a few days, for better or worse. A pity. I kind of liked it as a pocket democracy. But someone will make a bid — probably as a result of the action coming on the Marches.”

“What, the north Marches? So close? And so soon? I would have thought this business would drag on for a few more weeks, at least.”

The elderly lady looked around her before replying. No one else was close — or seemed close — and she lowered her voice and said, “Elblai has something up her sleeve, I think. I saw her going upstairs to talk to Raist…and without the man himself here, Raist would be doing the negotiating.”

“Argath’s not here?”

“He left about an hour ago — I saw him myself. In a hurry, too. I think things may be coming to a boil…something going on with his armies that he needs that world-famous charisma to handle.”

“Leaving Raist Wry-mind to sort out the details?”

“I don’t think Raist will be doing much sorting.” The old woman chuckled. “My money’s on Elblai….”

They moved away. Megan looked at the tapestry behind the empty chair, saw it flutter, swallowed, and headed that way.

Behind the tapestry, Leif was scratching. “The itch does really get to you,” he muttered.

“I wish you hadn’t mentioned that,” Megan said, suddenly feeling like a walking ad for an anti-flea preparation. “Look, I just heard something germane. Argath’s not here.”

“He’s not?” Leif paused, and then took a breath and started softly muttering something heartfelt in a language that Megan suspected was Nordic. The muttering did not sound like prayers.

“Listen, just put a sock in it for a moment, all right?” Megan said.

“All those miles wasted—”

“Don’t start cheapskating on me now, Leif. There’s no time for it. You know who is here?”

“Who?”

“Elblai.”

He blinked at that. “That Elblai?”

“The same. She’s upstairs somewhere, having a quiet talk with one of Argath’s people, so I hear.”

“Zaffermets,” Leif said. “Remember what that guy back in the tavern was saying—”

“Yes, and I’m not going to discuss it any further unless you tell me what language zaffermets is! I think you make some of these words up just to impress people. It’s not like you don’t already speak umpty-ump languages as it is.”

“It’s Romansch,” Leif said idly, looking around him. “Sursilvan dialect, I think. Look, I think I can manage one more bout of the no-see-um spell.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you want to go eavesdrop on Elblai, or don’t you?”

“Ohh…” Megan was deep in exasperation. “Come on…we’ve got to find them.”

“Shouldn’t be hard. Staying invisible, though—”

“Don’t let it slip,” Megan said, “whatever you do. Come on, the stairs are this way. We’ll hug the wall and try not to run into each other, okay?”

The stairs were guarded, but that was no obstacle to Megan and Leif. The guards, though alert, were not invisibility-sensitive, and were in no position to guard against what they couldn’t see or hear. Megan and Leif stole up behind them and went silently up the stairs, which followed the left wall up to the second floor. Leif concentrated as best he could on holding the invisibility spell in place. He had paid for it, all right, as had Megan, but if you were careless, you could drop it, just as you might drop and break something expensive that you’d bought. And in this case, dropping the spell could be just as costly.

The second floor was open-plan, one big room with carved or fabric-covered screens positioned here and there in the northern fashion, to make temporary privacy for anyone using the space. More thick tapestries were positioned around the walls to cut the drafts from the slit-windows. Off to one side, Elblai sat in a large, ornate chair positioned in front of a carved screen, and a man sat on a smaller chair in front of her. He was a small man, slender, short-haired and short-bearded, dressed in dark clothes.

Leif moved cautiously in that direction, staying very close to the wall. He could hear the soft sounds of Megan following behind him. The lighting up here was subdued, and mostly in the middle of the room, from a pair of oil lamps on intricately wrought metal stands.

Leif decided not to go any closer than ten feet or so, and flattened himself against the tapestry, being careful not to move it. He could feel a soft flutter in the wool as Megan did the same, and they both spent a moment examining Elblai. She’s worth looking at, Leif thought: fiftyish, a little on the stocky side, with close-cropped silvery-blond hair and a face rather at odds with the housewifely body. She had eyes that were set a little slanted, giving her face a slightly exotic look, but her eyes were large, and thoughtful, and the deepest blue that Leif could remember seeing — almost a violet color. She looked like somebody’s grandmother…but a grandmother sitting comfortably with a sword in one hand, point down on the stone floor, and wearing a beautiful glittering shirt of scale mail over a long padded silk tunic the color of the very tip of a candle flame. Her well-worn boots were up on a hassock in front of her chair, and she sat back in the chair holding her sword with one hand resting on the hilts, tilting it a little to one side, a little to the other, in a slow rocking motion as she talked.

“Those three have been a thorn in my side for months now,” she was saying in a soft Midwestern drawl to the small, dapper man sitting across from her. “Now, your master is in a position to do me a good turn.”

“I am sure he could be convinced to do you one,” said the man, stroking his close-cropped beard, “assuming that you could demonstrate to him that such an intervention would be to his advantage.” He was dressed all in shimmering black: quilted satin — another tunic meant to be worn under mail, but the mail had been laid aside, and he wore only a long dagger at his belt.

Elblai laughed out loud. “Raist, you can’t tell me that Lillan and Gugliem and Menel haven’t been just as much pains in his butt as they are in mine. Since spring they’ve been wandering around the North country looking for a fight to interfere in. I didn’t have anything going on that I wanted them interfering in, and I told them so, and told them to clear on out before I lost my patience. Well, they cleared out, all right, but where do they go? Straight off to the Orxenian Marches, and what do they do but sell off their armies’ contracts to Argath.”

“Oh, now,” said the dapper little man, “now then, Lady Elblai, but you have your facts somewhat confused. Those contracts were purchased by Enver, Lord of the Marchlands, who as we all know—”

“—who as we all know doesn’t fart without Argath telling him what color to do it in,” Elblai said, with an impatient frown. “Don’t insult my intelligence by trying to convince me that Enver is some kind of loose cannon. Argath instructed him to buy those contracts on the quiet, and point those three lords’ armies at mine, which, I might add, have been sitting in summer quarters and very peaceably minding their own business. A state of affairs which your master cannot understand, and so believes that there must be some kind of plot behind it.”

Elblai uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way, all the while rocking the point-down sword idly and gently back and forth, back and forth, so that it caught the light of one of the oil lamps, and the reflection slid back and forth over a hanging tapestry there, and the running hunting dogs on the tapestry seemed to stare at the moving patch of light. “Well, he wants a plot, I’ll give him a plot. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the troop movements the last few days. I know an encirclement when I see it. Attempted encirclement. Your master, Argath, had better look east, because my reinforcements are coming up, in force. And there are more than three times as many of them as he can field just now. I know his numbers, and his intentions, if he doesn’t know mine. But that’s what I hire my wizards for, and I make sure I have the best.”

The small dapper man sat very still. His face showed no change of expression at all.

“Now your master has several possible courses of action,” Elblai said reasonably. “He can go on the way he’s going. In which case, late tomorrow or early the day after, Lillan, Gugliem, and Menel are going to be fertilizer, along with their armies. And having put them to their best possible use, I’ll then turn my attention to doing the same for Argath. It might take a little longer, but my people are mobilized and ready, and his are scattered all over the place, supposedly cowing the surrounding kingdoms into inaction. Well, we’ll see about that. My guess is that the minute somebody attacks Argath with a force big enough to make a difference, then all the neighbors, who have been putting up with his depredations for quite long enough now, will join in, too. You think he fancies an attack on five fronts? Because that’s what we’re looking at. If not more. Argath, King of the Orxenians, will be a red greasy smear on the ground by the time my horse and everybody else’s finishes up with running all over him.”

Elblai paused. There was utter silence in the room, except for the tiny, tiny noise made by the point of Elblai’s sword as it grated on the stone floor. Leif held his breath, sure that someone would hear him breathing in that stillness. Beside him, he suspected that Megan was doing the same.

“Now,” Elblai said at last, “that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that he can call off his three little friends and tell them to take their armies somewhere else. In which case everyone will shortly know exactly what happened. None of them could ever keep a secret worth a damn, especially when they think they’ve been used for purposes which they didn’t anticipate themselves. In this case, they’ll sure think so, and your master will lose a lot of face, and lay himself open to all kinds of trouble, if not this year, then next. But I’d bet on this year myself.”

“You are very certain of all this, aren’t you?” asked Raist.

“Oh, you bet,” said Elblai. “I’m equally certain that your master will not avail himself of possibility number two either. Too much chance that he’ll come out of it looking bad. So there is also possibility number three…in which he comes down on Lillan and Gugliem and Menel himself, and wipes their armies out — thus giving his army something to do besides being wiped out by mine — and makes a reputation for himself by ‘keeping order in the Marches.’ He gets to look good for a change. A nuisance, by which I mean those three and their armies, is removed. And Argath doesn’t lose any face.”

Raist opened his mouth.

“But he wouldn’t normally take possibility number three either, I don’t think,” Elblai said, “because he didn’t think of it first.”

Raist closed his mouth again. “He’d probably have to kill Lord Enver, too,” Elblai added as an afterthought, “but he’s been wanting to do that for a while anyway.”

There was more silence for a few breaths. “So,” Elblai said. “You go back to your lord — he left an hour ago, heading north for his army’s encampment — and explain the options to him. Be nice about it. I really prefer the third one myself. But if he tries to force the issue, I am prepared to wipe him and his armies off the face of Sarxos, and not even Rod will shed a tear. You just have him be clear about that, because I always like to have one good fight before the autumn sets in…and if he insists, it’ll be him. This is his last chance to change his mind, make it a nice quiet autumn for everybody…and ensure that he lives long enough to have one.”

Raist stood up. “If I have your ladyship’s permission to go—”

“In one moment more. I know, too, that after this campaign he has designs on Lord Fettick and Duchess Morn. Their countries have been in fairly precarious positions up until now. Well, we’ve been talking…and they’re preparing to enter into a strategic alliance with another power — not me, let your lord and master do a little digging — who is eager to take them on. When that alliance is in place — within a matter of days, I’d think — the forces they’re going to be able to bring into the field are going to be massive. They will almost certainly go straight to war, eager to get Argath out of their collective hair. And they’ll take out Duke Mengor as well. They’re perfectly aware to what use Argath has been putting that cooperative little puppet. So just have him understand that his troubles are just beginning.”

Raist stood there fidgeting, silent. After a moment, Elblai nodded at him. “Go on, then. Be careful on the road. There are a lot of wolves running loose around here at the moment….”

Raist bowed hurriedly and left, his footsteps echoing down the stairs.

Elblai sat quietly in the still room. After a moment there were more footsteps on the stairs, and a young blond woman in a long simple blue robe appeared on the landing. “Aunt El?” she called.

“Over here, honey.”

Aunt? Leif thought.

The young woman came in. “So?” she said.

Elblai sighed and leaned the sword against the arm of her chair. “He’s going to attack,” she said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“So what’re you going to do?”

Elblai got up and stretched. “I’m going to run him and his troops right into the ground,” she said. “I don’t see that I’m going to have much choice, if I’m to sustain my position. As for him, I’d prefer to avoid the killing, but he hasn’t got the brains Rod gave bluepoint oysters, and he will insist on doing the showy thing. Won’t help him, not this time.”

The young woman sighed, almost exactly the sound her aunt had made. “All right,” she said. “I’ll talk to the other captains and update them, and we’ll send out messengers to the reinforcements.”

“Do that. Tell them I think Argath will try to scrape together some more troops from the tributary kingdoms. I don’t think he can find many more than a couple thousand extra, though, not at this short notice. We’re still going to outnumber him three to one — which is just the way I like it. Never had time for these even-steven death-or-glory stands myself.” She snorted — a sound Leif had heard from his own grandmother occasionally, so that he smiled. “Let’s get that seen to…and then go down and have some dinner before everybody eats it all.”

They went out.

Once again, Leif relaxed the invisibility spells. To their relief, the buzzing in their ears subsided.

Leif glanced sidewise at Megan.

“We’ve got a big problem,” Megan whispered.

“Yeah? What?”

“Keep your voice down. Weren’t you listening? She’s going to take Argath,” Megan said. “That makes her a prime target for being bounced.”

Leif looked at her cockeyed. “Wait a minute. You were the one who was going on before about not theorizing without data. We don’t have any more data than we did before…except some about an attack that’s about to happen.”

“Sure…but you heard it, Leif! She’s got Argath outnumbered three to one. She’s going to cream him. And it’s people who’ve creamed him in the past who’ve gotten bounced.”

“Listen, I hope she does cream him,” Leif whispered. “He’s not exactly an example of high Sarxonian moral standards, is he? And besides, if his character gets killed and people still get bounced, then maybe we have some evidence that it’s not him doing it.”

Megan stared at him. “That would be as circumstantial as what we’ve got now,” she said. “Leif, if Elblai is going to be attacked somehow and we suspect it, we’ve got to go out on a limb a little and let her know about it! She’s got a tremendous character running here — it wouldn’t be fair to let her be bounced just for the sake of tempting the ‘bouncer’ out into the open. She’s got to take some precautions.”

“If we do warn her,” Leif said, “it could warn off Argath, or whoever’s responsible for these bounces. And we’ll lose a chance to find out who he or she is.”

Megan clutched her head. “I can’t believe we’re having this argument. You can’t just use another player as bait!”

“Megan, think straight for a moment! Warn her how? We don’t know who she is in real life, and we’re not going to find out. What about the confidentiality rules? If she’s secret, and chooses to be, there’s no way we can find her.”

“If we got hold of the gamesmaster,” Megan said, “through Net Force—”

“Sure. Ask them to break confidentiality on a suspicion? No way they’ll do it. Even if we could talk them into it, it would take too long to do any good.”

“We’ll have to go warn her now, then,” Megan said.

Leif looked at her for a long moment. Then, rather reluctantly, he said, “All right. You saw her device — that basilisk. There were a few of her people downstairs wearing it. Let’s go down and introduce ourselves…come out in the open about it.”

“Right.”

Leif let go of the invisibility, relieved that he didn’t have to hold it anymore, and they went back downstairs again. In the great hall, they looked around, but there was no sign of Elblai herself.

“There are some little private rooms off the sides,” Leif said. “She might be in one of those—”

“No,” Megan said. “They’d be guarded. But look there.”

It was the young woman whom they had seen with Elblai earlier. Over her plain blue robe she had thrown a darker one, with the rampant basilisk badge of Elblai’s people on it. She was looking thoughtfully around the room at the nobles and warriors as they ate and drank and talked.

Megan and Leif went over to her, causing some interest and amusement among the assembled nobles as they took in the sight of the somewhat oddly dressed party crashers. “Excuse me,” Leif said to the young blond woman, and bowed slightly. “If, as I think, you are with the noble Lady Elblai—”

“If you’re looking for an audience,” said the woman, eyeing him with an interested expression, “I’m afraid she is not available tonight.”

“Not an audience,” Megan said softly. “A warning.”

The woman put her eyebrows up. “Of what?”

“Argath,” Leif said.

The woman’s expression became much more guarded.

“If, as rumor has it, your lady is contemplating an attack on Argath’s forces,” Leif said, “we must warn her that something…unfortunate…might befall her afterwards. People who have beaten Argath in battle recently have been coming to harm…as we see from this gathering tonight.”

The expression on the face of Elblai’s niece began to get downright chilly. “An interesting warning,” she said. “Who sent you?”

Leif opened his mouth, closed it again.

“One might think that such a warning would be to Argath’s advantage,” the young woman said, “if indeed any such attack were in prospect.”

“No one has sent us,” Megan said. “We’re working independently…and we mean your aunt, the Lady Elblai, nothing but good.”

The young woman’s eyes widened just a very little, then hardened down again. “That relationship is not widely known,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Uh,” Megan said.

“We’re investigating the ‘bounces,’” Leif said, and Megan felt a sudden rush of relief that he hadn’t added “for Net Force.” That would have been going a little too far. “We’re afraid that your aunt is in danger of becoming a ‘bouncee’ if she keeps going the way she’s going.”

“Oh? And which way would that be?”

How do I put this the most diplomatically? Leif thought, wondering how his father would phrase this. Probably pretty elliptically. “If Lillan and Gugliem and Menel—” Leif began.

The young woman’s eyes narrowed right down. “One does not normally speak of — external things,” she said, “to people one doesn’t know, and whose bona fides can’t be guaranteed.” Her expression was quite chilly now. “I think I must ask you to leave.”

“Please — just let us have a word with Lady Elblai.”

“That is impossible. She has been called away on business: which perhaps is fortunate.”

“Look, it’s really important,” Megan said.

“Perhaps it is to you,” said the young woman coolly. “I would take your warning more kindly if it did not seem obvious that you, or someone connected with you, had recently been spying on us. Spies’ advice has two edges, they say, and it’s my business to protect my aunt against those who would do her harm.”

“But that’s what we’re trying to—”

“Good night,” the young woman said firmly. “Leave right now…before I have you removed.”

They looked at her, then headed for the door.

Leif looked over his shoulder at the woman one last time as they headed out. Elblai’s niece had beckoned over someone else wearing her aunt’s badge, a tall balding man, and was now whispering urgently in his ear. He looked after Leif and Megan, and then left the great hall hurriedly, out one of the side exits. Megan and Leif were still standing out in the roil and turmoil of the town’s main square when a rider went by them at some speed — and then simply vanished with a clap of displaced air.

“Great,” Leif muttered. “Now there’s no way to tell where she’s gone off to.”

“I’m getting a very bad feeling about this,” Megan said. “I think this business with Argath has just heated up somehow. Otherwise, why would he be gone, too?”

Leif shook his head. “Well,” he said, “at least we tried.”

“Trying doesn’t get the job done,” Megan said gloomily. “Doing it does.”

Leif looked at her wryly as they walked through the square. “Ah, the classics again,” he said. “Emerson? Ellison?”

“My mom,” Megan said. “Come on…let’s get out of here. We need to think, and as much as I hate to say it, I always think best off-line.”

They logged out of the game and went off to Leif’s workspace. It was something Megan had only seen in pictures, a stave-house in the old Icelandic style, completely covered with shake shingles, its steep gables sporting elaborately carved dragon-heads. Inside, the place was very clean and plain, done in a high-tech version of New Danish Modern, the big polarized windows looking out on a landscape of green rolling fields overarched by a high, pale blue sky.

Megan wasn’t in much of a mood to enjoy the surroundings or the scenery. She and Leif argued for about an hour over what they’d done and how they could have done it better. At least, it turned into an argument, though that hadn’t been her original intention.

“I’m not sure how we could have done it better, frankly,” Leif said. “It was a fact-finding mission. Fine. We found facts. And pretty good ones, too.”

“Yeah…but Leif, we’re not going to be able to find out anything fast enough to do us any good! I can’t get rid of the feeling that we should have gone about this in a more structured way.”

“Oh? And how long have you had this feeling? I don’t think you had it before we left.”

“Whatever. I have it now. And I’m worried about those other two Elblai mentioned, too. Fettick and Morn.” Megan was pacing up and down, shaking her head. “Supposing that Argath manages to walk away from this fight that’s coming — which he might manage to do; he’s got a pretty good record of escaping from trouble even when his whole army gets massacred — and then he decides to come down on them? From what Elblai said, they’re going to be in a position to beat him as well…and that’s going to make them potential ‘bouncees.’”

“It will,” Leif said, “if we’re not running down a blind alley with this whole line of reasoning to start with.”

“If you’ve got anything better,” Megan said, “I’d really like to hear it.”

Leif sat down on a severely plain couch and ran his fingers through that red hair in a gesture that said he didn’t have anything else at all. “Look,” he said, “let’s take a break from this, huh? We’re just spinning our wheels.”

Megan sighed and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Look, when should we meet again?”

“Maybe tomorrow night?” Leif said.

“Can’t,” Megan said. “Tomorrow night’s a family night at our place. I don’t game then. I get to watch my brothers sit and eat us out of house and home. The night after?”

“You’re on.”

Megan prepared to tell her implant to exit. “Look,” she said. “Sorry I yelled at you.”

“No, you’re not,” Leif said, and grinned, though the grin was crooked.

“All right. I’m not. But you were right anyway. We did the best we could, to start with.”

Leif stuck one finger in his ear as if to clean it. “Must be how long I had to hold that invisibility spell,” he said. “I could have sworn you said I was right.”

“I’ll say something else in a moment,” Megan said. “And in English. See you the night after next.”

Leif waved at her as she vanished.

Megan blinked and found herself sitting in the chair in the office. The lights in the room were way down. She glanced over at the clock. It was very late, for a school night anyway. Fortunately she had taken care of her schoolwork before she ducked into Sarxos to meet Leif. All I need is Mom on my case as well….

She got out of the chair stiffly. I’ve really got to have another word with the move-your-muscles program. I feel like I’ve been in the same spot for hours. Quietly she moved around the downstairs office, shutting off the parts of the computer that got turned off at night, and paused by the desk, where someone had, for a change, thoughtfully pushed some piled-up books out of the way of the optical implant pickup. Dining with William Shakespeare. Understanding Chaos Futures. War in 2080. The Knight, Death, and the Devil.

What is he researching? Megan thought, yawned, and went off to bed.

She came down early the next morning to find her father sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the stereo-video window hanging on the kitchen wall with a rather concerned expression. “Isn’t this something you do in your off hours?” he said, pointing at the window.

Megan, who was in the act of struggling to pull a sweater on over her shirt, finally got it pulled down into place and stared at the window. It showed the Sarxos logo, and behind that, stereo footage of a stretcher being hovered out of a flyer ambulance into an emergency room by paramedics in the usual rescue-orange coveralls with the blue LifeStar on the backs. “—assault was said by the woman’s niece, a fellow Sarxos player, to possibly be related to a feud or vendetta attributable to some other gameplayer. Ellen Richardson, who plays in the popular Sarxos virtual-reality role-playing game under the nickname Elblai, was on her way to her job at the post office in Bloomington, Illinois, when a hit-and-run driver forced her vehicle off the road and caused her to crash into a utility pole. She was taken to Mercy Downtown Hospital, where she is reported to be in a coma. Her condition is described as ‘critical but stable.’”

The view changed to that of a woman in a lab coat reading from a prepared statement. “The patient is not responding to stimuli at this time, but she has been scheduled for surgery at the earliest opportunity, and doctors presently give her a seventy-thirty chance of—”

“OhmiGod,” Megan said softly.

“You didn’t know her, did you?” her father said.

She shook her head, unable to look away from the stereo window, now filled with the face of the young blond-haired woman to whom she had been speaking not eight or nine hours ago. It was streaked with tears, and contorted with barely controlled rage. “We received a warning,” she was saying, “that if my aunt continued a certain line of action she was taking in the game, something unspecified but unpleasant might happen to her. My aunt discounted this warning. You hear a lot of this kind of thing during the course of gameplay, people trying to bluff you out of their path. No one had any idea that someone would—”

She choked with tears, turned away from the camera, waving it away with one hand.

Megan stood there, going hot and cold with terror.

We were too late. Too late.

What if—

— oh, no, what if somebody thinks that we—

She ran for the computer to call James Winters.