The Deadliest Game

3

When she caught him in his office, the blinds were drawn, and Winters was gazing down thoughtfully at an audiostereo information pad on his desk. “Yes,” he said, not looking up for the moment, “I thought I’d hear from you shortly. How much do you know about what’s happened?”

“I heard about the lady in Bloomington,” Megan said. “Mr. Winters, I feel so terrible — we were with her just last night—”

“So Leif told me,” Winters said. “She didn’t know you were there, though.”

“No.”

“Tell me something,” Winters said, and then held up a hand. “No, wait a moment. Before we go on to that…” He glanced down at the pad again. “I’ve got a note here from the hospital at Bloomington. She’s going into surgery now. Most of her injuries aren’t too serious. It’s the usual problem with brain trauma, though. You can’t tell how bad it is until the brain’s had time to ‘register’ the injury and react to it. She apparently has a case of what they call ‘contrecoup,’ where the brain hits the inside of the skull and bruises with the impact. If they can get the swelling to go down in time…she’ll be all right. At least it doesn’t seem as if she’s in any imminent danger of dying.”

“Oh, God,” Megan said, “we should have tried harder, we should have found some way to warn her anyway, we should have—”

“Yes,” Winters said, only a little dryly, “hindsight does tend to be twenty-twenty. But in this case, you need to step back from the events a little bit and see if your judgment’s being clouded by what’s happened. I’ll admit, it’s shocking.”

He sighed, and pushed the pad away. “In any case, I want you to step right back from this whole business and let us handle it now. When it’s just machinery involved, burglary, destruction of property, that’s one thing. But when assault starts coming into it — in this case, vehicular assault with a deadly weapon — that’s when it becomes no longer merely Explorer business. I value anything you can tell me, though, about your own suspicions.”

“Suspicions are all we’ve got,” Megan said. “But I can’t get rid of the idea that they would have been enough to save her.”

“Maybe so,” Winters said. “Leif spent a while telling me about a character named Argath.”

Megan nodded. “Just about anyone who’s had a fight with him in the last three game-years, and beaten him, seems to have been bounced.”

“But you’re not sure he’s responsible.”

“I don’t know anymore. Yesterday I was really suspicious, but…there wasn’t enough data.”

Winter smiled a little grimly. “There still may not be. We need to be rather Holmesian about this. Of course, when Net Force proper comes into it, we’ll be able to get the Sarxos people to cooperate with us and release proper names, game logs, and other such information. Of course it’ll still take due process. They never like letting proprietary stuff go easily.”

Megan said, “Maybe if a player approached Chris Rodrigues.”

Winter said, “We can’t spend too much time with the ‘maybes’ at this point. We’ll do this one by the book. Anyway, from what investigation you’ve done so far, is there anyone else upon whom suspicion might genuinely be thrown?”

“Nobody who’s obvious to us, no. The problem is that there are so very many players. Even if we could get at it, the database is so massive. I keep thinking that there must be some way to winnow through everybody, but I don’t know what that would be. Lots of players would have characteristics that would match a possible motive for attack, but only one of them is responsible. You can’t go around accusing innocent people just on the off chance that they might be guilty.”

“There speaks a future operative,” Winters said, and there was a grim note of approval in his voice. “Well. Megan, you’re still in shock. It’s understandable. Leif was, too. Let’s part company for the moment. But I’d appreciate a written debrief from you in the next eighteen to twenty-four hours: something to brief our operatives with when we send them in. Make it as detailed as you can. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d speak to the Sarxos people and give us access to your game logs from last night.”

Megan blushed hot at that. “Mr. Winters,” she said very softly, “I think some of the things we said were construed as threats—”

“I heard Mrs. Richardson’s niece’s statement,” Winters said. “I understand you have some concerns about what your legal status might be in this situation. I think you know that you have my confidence. Should there be any legal repercussions, you know that we’ll support you. But just in case it comes up, can anyone at your home alibi you for last night?”

Megan shook her head. “Nobody except the Net itself,” she said. “There’s no faking your identity when you log in, after all. It’s your brain, your body, and your implant. And as for the rest of it…” She shrugged, and then added with just the slightest smile, “I’m not sure how I would have driven from here to Bloomington, Illinois, in time to run Elblai — Mrs. Richardson — off the road with a car.”

“There is that,” Winter said, and cracked a small smile himself. “Never mind. You’re covered for the moment. Go on, go to school, and get that report done for me tonight, if you would. We’ll be sending in operatives ASAP. Meanwhile, you should consider yourself relieved of responsibility for this business. But I want to thank you very much for your help so far. You’ve at least given us a lead to follow, you two, and some potentially useful theories. Plus a much better strategic assessment than we could have managed on short notice. It’s much appreciated. You put your talents and your time on the line…and possibly, considering the nature of the person we seem to be hunting, your personal safety as well, if that person got any sense of who you were and what you were up to.”

“I don’t think we were anywhere near him,” Megan said. “Thanks anyway.”

She cut off the connection, thought a moment, then spoke to her implant and had it call Leif.

He was sitting in his workspace in the stave-house, looking profoundly depressed — an unusual expression for him. He glanced up as Megan appeared in his space.

“You talk to him?” Leif asked.

“Yeah.”

“We’re off the case.”

“Yeah.”

Leif looked up at Megan sideways. “Are we off the case?”

“What do you mean? Of course we’re off. He took us off.”

“And you’re just going to sit back and let it be that way? Just like that?”

“Well.” Megan looked at him.

Leif got up and started pacing. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to sound unduly heroic or anything. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a little bit responsible.”

“For what? We didn’t run that lady off the road!”

“We tried to warn her. We did it wrong. She didn’t get it. Don’t you feel responsible for that?”

Megan sat down on that severely plain couch and dropped her head into her hands. “Yeah,” she said. “I do. A lot. And I don’t know what we can do about it, now that it’s happened.”

“Not just give up,” Leif said.

“But, Leif, you heard Winters. He’s taken us out of the loop. If they catch us—”

“How are they going to catch us? It’s not like we’re not Sarxos players. It’s not like we don’t have a right to be in the game when we want to. Isn’t that so?”

“Yeah, but — Leif, if we do that, they’re gonna know right away what we’re doing!”

“Are they? But we’re good little Net Force Explorers, aren’t we?” Leif’s grin popped out, and looked unusually mischievous for a moment. “Who’d ever suspect us of disobeying orders? Intentionally, anyway.” Leif held his head high and looked for a moment impossibly noble, innocent, and dim.

Megan had to laugh at the sight of him.

“Not that they can give us orders,” Leif said. “Suggestions, yes…”

“You are amazing,” she said.

“Thank you. And modest.”

“Oy,” Megan said.

“Look,” Leif said. “Think about it. The reason we’re lucky enough to be Explorers in the first place is because they saw something in us that was not the usual kind of behavior. A little more willing to swing out into the unknown, maybe. If we just give up now because we’re told to—”

“If we were in Net Force, we’d have to do what we were told, Leif! Discipline—”

“Frack discipline,” Leif said. “Well, I don’t mean that. But we’re not fully in. It gives us a little—”

“—Latitude?” She scowled.

“Megan, I’m telling you, I’m right on this one. And you know I am. That’s why you’re making those weird faces at me. You should see yourself.”

She looked at him dubiously. It went right against her grain to ignore Winters’s “suggestion.” She understood his concern. She knew what her parents would say if she told them anything about this. But whether she planned to tell them anything about this, right this minute anyway, was another story. Maybe later. But right now — I have to make a choice.

“Well—” she said.

“And look,” Leif said. “We’ve still got problems. Argath, or whoever, is still out there, and I bet he, she, they, or it—”

“He, for my money,” Megan said.

“Yeah — anyway, they’re still targeting people. What about those other two lords that Elblai was mentioning? Fettick and Morn? To judge by what she was saying last night, they’re likely to be the next targets. I mean, look at it, Megan! Whoever’s doing this, they’re not waiting around to hit someone who’s beaten Argath anymore. Whether it is Argath himself, or someone using some kind of weird cover—”

“What I still don’t get is why anyone would do that.”

“A grudge,” Leif said. “Or the attacker is crazy. Never mind…there’s still time to work that out. But whatever the cause, whoever it is that’s doing this, they’ve stopped being patient about it. They’re hitting people before they actually fight Argath, when it just looks like there’s a possibility they might beat him.”

“Yeah. All right. I see your point. So — what’ll we do? Go try to warn them? Which kingdoms were in question?”

“Errint and Aedleia,” she said. “I know them slightly: they’re northern neighbors of Orxen. I’ve got more than enough transit to get us there. We can be there tonight. Their battles weren’t scheduled to happen right away. It’s just possible that we can—”

“What? Get them not to go ahead with a campaign that they’ve been planning, and that they really want? That’s gonna be a good trick.”

“We’ve got to try. We didn’t try hard enough last night…and look what happened. You want to see these new targets run off a road…or worse? And what about all the others who might shortly be in the same situation? There have to be other players who’ve been waiting their chance to take Argath on. After these guys, they’ll be a threat, too. If we can find out what other players are eager to fight him, we may be able to find some other connecting strand, some line of data that’ll lead us to whoever’s doing this. And I want them,” Leif said softly. “I want them.”

Megan nodded slowly. She did not often feel physically violent. Even when she managed to engineer situations that gave her an excuse, every now and then, to toss her brothers around, it was mostly enjoyment she felt, and amused satisfaction at the looks on their faces as she reminded them that life was not always predictable. But now…now she felt, uncharacteristically, like she wanted to hurt somebody. Specifically, whoever had sent Elblai into the hospital, pale, with an oxygen mask hiding her pretty, motherly face.

“Look,” Leif said. “Do your briefing for Winters. Get that finished, leave it on timed-send in your computer, and get it off to him tonight…after we’re already in Sarxos. Or after we’ve come out.”

“Leif, I can’t tonight,” Megan said. “I told you, I have this family thing—”

“This is an emergency,” Leif said. “Isn’t it? Can’t you beg off just this once?”

She thought about that, thought about the concerned look on her father’s face. “Probably,” she said. “I don’t usually do this.”

“Come on, Megan. It’s important. And it’s more than just those other people.” He looked at her, intense. “What are you really thinking about doing after you get out of school?”

“Well, strategic operations, obviously, but—”

“But where? For some think tank? Doing it in some dry boring place where you’ll never actually get out to see whether what you’ve planned is happening? You want to do it in Net Force, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Megan said. “Of course I do. It’s…I think it’s one of the most important agencies we’ve got now, though there are probably people who would say that’s overrating it.” She shifted a little uncomfortably. “It’s the cutting edge.”

“Well, you want to stay there, don’t you? If you back off from this now, just because Winters told you to get out of danger, out of trouble…If we succeed in making it into Net Force someday, there’s going to be danger and trouble. This is just practice. Besides — they’re watching us. You know they’re watching us. If we go in alongside them — maybe even ahead of them — and crack this thing, with our eyes open and our brains hot, you think they’re going to be angry about that? I don’t think so. They’re going to be impressed. If we impress them now—”

Megan nodded. “I can’t believe,” she said slowly, “that we’re not at least as good as any operatives they’re going to send in there. Besides, we know Sarxos better than anyone they’ve got. That’s why they asked us to go in in the first place. Because we’re best…”

She looked up at Leif, grinned, and got up. “I’m with you,” she said. “Look, I’m not sure what time I’ll get into the game tonight. Opting out of family night is going to take some explaining.”

“Okay…well, I’ll go in before you, and wait for you — and I’ll leave some transit in your account. We’ll meet in Errint, and see if we can catch Fettick first and warn him off. The place is just a little city-state, kind of like Minsar. When you get to the city, there’s a little cookshop just inside the third wall, a place called Attila’s.”

Megan raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Leif said, “they make good chili there. I’ll sit there and amuse myself until you get there. Then we’ll go in and engineer a chat with Fettick…take our time and make sure he understands.”

“All right,” Megan said. “We do have to try. But talking someone out of a campaign is going to be interesting.”

“I think we can change his mind. After that, we can start looking around for some more indicators to what’s really going on. I’m sure we can crack this if we just have a little more time….”

“Right. I’ll see you tonight, then.”

She vanished.

Leif came to Errint in the late afternoon of a clearing golden day. The city stood in a small glacial valley associated with the furthest eastward-flung massif of the great northern Highpeak range. Sometime far back in the place’s apparent geological history, when the continent of Sarxos was supposed to have been glaciated, a huge broad-bottomed river of ice had come grinding slowly down from the wide and snowy cirque of Mount Holdfast above the valley, and had burred the valley down into a long, gentle U-shaped trough nearly nine miles long. Now the glacier was gone, retreated to the very feet of Holdfast, with only the telltale threaded stream running down from the glacier’s terminal moraine left winding down the valley, in a meander of scattered white rounded stones and the peculiar milky green-white water that betrayed a riverbed covered with glacial “flour.”

Up on a little spur of stone that somehow had avoided being ground down by the glacier, Errint rose. It had been a wooden city in its earliest incarnations, but it kept burning down, and so it was finally rebuilt in stone, and its sign and sigil became the phoenix. Its population was not large, but they were famous: sturdy, independent mountain people, dangerous in battle, good with a halberd or a crossbow. They tended to keep themselves to themselves and not mix in foreign wars…unless the pay was good. Their city had a small but steady source of wealth from the salt and iron mines in the mountain, which they controlled jealously, telling no one the secrets of the labyrinthine ways in and out. They farmed the long, gentle, stony valley in a small way, oats and barley mostly, and tried to mind their own business.

That had become less easy of late. Argath’s rise in the Northlands had meant that the kingdoms on the fringes of his realm had started looking for allies, or buffer states that would protect them from the unfriendly neighbor just over the mountain passes. To the countries to the north — meaning Argath — and to the south — meaning the realms of Duke Morgon and others — Errint looked like a perfect possibility: a small population unlikely to put up much of a fight; ground not worth much except as a buffer, so that battles fought across it wouldn’t ruin its value; and the mines, source of the peerless Holdfast iron, much sought after in Sarxos for weapons.

The Errint did not take kindly to the thought of being anybody’s buffer state, however. When Argath first came down out of the mountains to annex them, they had fought him and driven him back. Just last year they had done it again. But then Argath had twice made the mistake of attacking into the teeth of their weather, which the Errint knew better than anyone. Even in the summer, those somnolent-looking dolomite peaks could wrap themselves around in cloud and turn ferocious, and down the valley would come screaming the killing wind, the fierce hot wind that poured itself over the northern mountain crests, stirred the few little glacial lakes to madness, and kindled thunderstorms that seemed almost pathologically fond of striking invading troops with lightning.

It was a tough nut to crack, little Errint. Not that it was uncrackable, nor was its leadership so misguided as to think it so. They knew very well Argath’s brooding power to the north. They had never been in a position to attack it independently. But things might be changing now….

So Leif stood in the open gate of the city, looking around the place, and the gate-guards, leaning on their straight sharp halberds, looked back at him with equanimity. They were big, dark-haired, blunt-featured men, typical of Errint blood, favoring leather instead of cloth for wear. Leif nodded to them, knowing that they had already sized him up as harmless and friendly — otherwise he would have been flat on the ground, with one of those oversized army canopeners stuck in his gut. The guards nodded to him affably enough, and Leif went in.

Errint’s basic structure was a little like Minsar’s, except on a much smaller scale. Also, there were no outbuildings permitted beyond the fifth wall, the outermost one. The bakers and tanners and so forth were pushed well back in the rearmost curve between the fourth and fifth walls, but no one pitched tents or temporary buildings outside for the simple reason that one of those sudden summer windstorms or rainstorms could simply wash them right down off the Errint Hill and into the river. The marketplace inside the third wall, therefore, was unusually crowded with tents and awnings and tables and pallets and bales. Every day was market day in Errint. A thriving trade made its way up and down the valley’s single road toward the lowlands, people who had come for metal or an animal-skin and stayed to pick up something extra, a firkin of mountain butter or the famous glacier wine.

It was late enough in the day that the market had lost much of its agitation. There were still a few cries of “Buy my beer!” or “Skins, good skins here, no holes!”—but it all had a desultory feel, as if everyone was already thinking of heading out to get something to eat or drink. The one steady sound there was a ting-CLANK, ting-CLANK that Leif knew, and he smiled a little as he made his way through the market stalls toward the source of it.

Here in iron-mine country, lots of people knew a little about forging — the rudiments — but a really good blacksmith was harder to find, and harder still to find was a really good farrier. They tended to travel around to where the business was good. Only the very best would have a fixed place of work where they could expect clients to beat a path to their doors with their horses in tow. This one, though, was plenty good.

Leif pushed his way through the part of the market reserved for the butchers, past the last few beef carcasses hanging in the late sun with clouds of flies shrilling about them, and came to a spot by the curve of the wall where someone had parked a cart. It was from here that the rhythmic ting-CLANK sound came. Nearby, its head down and its reins fastened to an iron ring in the back end of the cart, a big, patient blond draft horse stood. Just in front of the horse, working at an anvil lifted up onto what had been some rich Errint’s mounting-stone, was a small, fair man in a light, worn tan canvas shirt and well-worn leathern breeches, with a thick leather apron over it all, hammering away at a horseshoe that had just been in the portable forgepit, which had come out of his cart and now stood near the anvil on the ground. The bellows hung at hand in the cart’s framework, ready to work. The farrier paused a moment to pick up the horseshoe with his tongs and shove it in among the coals to heat again. When it came up to cherry-red, he took it out with the tongs and began beating it again on the anvil.

“Wayland,” Leif said.

The face that looked up at him was deeply lined, all smile lines. The eyes had that distant-looking expression of someone mountain-bred, though not these mountains. “Well, it’s young Leif,” Wayland said. “Well met in the afternoon! What brings you up here this time of year?”

“Just wandering around,” Leif said, “as usual.”

Wayland looked at him with a grin that suggested he might be taking what Leif said with a grain of salt. “Ah, well, may be, may be.”

“I might ask the same of you,” Leif said. “You’re not usually up here this close to autumn. I thought you’d decided you didn’t want any more of this weather. Lowlands for me, I thought you said, come the fall.”

“Aah, it’s still summer, though, isn’t it?” said Wayland. He dropped his voice. “And as for you, with your healing stone and all, I don’t think you’re just wandering. My money says you have some other reason to be here.”

“Hate to see you lose your bet,” said Leif, sitting down on the side-step of the cart, out of the way. For a couple of minutes he just sat and watched Wayland finish hammering the horseshoe. Wayland plunged it into a bucket of water nearby; the water boiled and hissed in a rush of steam. The horse flicked its ears back and forth, unconcerned. “Man wants to make a living,” Wayland said casually, “you’ve got to go where the business is going to be.”

“You think there’s going to be business here?”

“Oh, aye,” said Wayland, fishing with the tongs in the bucket to get the horseshoe out. “Plenty of business soon, I think.” He glanced in the direction of the city gates, up and over the walls, eastward down the long valley. “Going to be fighting around here before long.”

He lifted the draft horse’s right forefoot, caught it between his knees, and turned his back on Leif for the moment. “Who would you say?” Leif said.

For a moment Wayland didn’t say anything. He glanced over his shoulder — rather hurriedly, Leif thought — and then down to his work again. Leif looked over his shoulder, the way Wayland had looked, and saw, past the various people still walking in the marketplace, past the beef carcasses, a strange little shape go by. A strange small man, less than four feet high. Not, as correctness would have it, a small person, but definitely a dwarf. He was dressed in noisy, eye-hurting orange and green motley, with a scaled-down lute strung on a baldric over his shoulder.

The little man passed out of view for a moment. “Duke Mengor has come visiting,” said Wayland, apropos of apparently nothing.

“Visiting Lord Fettick?”

“Aye, aye.” Wayland put the first of the nails into the first of the holes made for it in the horseshoe, drove the nail in halfway, and then started beating what was left of it upward and outward, clenching it up and around the edge of the shoe. “Been here a day or so, talking about whatever high lords do talk about. Nice dinner last night up at the High House.” He glanced sidewise up at the modest little castle that sat inside the city’s innermost ring. “Some talk about Fettick’s daughter being of marriageable age.”

“Is she?”

Wayland’s face worked, and he spat. “Well, she’s fourteen. Might be marriageable down south, but…” He raised his eyebrows. “Well, no accounting for foreign ways.”

“Do you think this marriage will come off?”

“Not if something else does first,” said Wayland, very softly. “Someone’s trying to save his skin.”

Leif dropped his voice right down too. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Argath, would it?”

Wayland gave Leif a sidelong look, and spat into the fire: an old mountain gesture suggesting that some words were better not spoken at all, let alone too loudly. After a few seconds, he spoke. “Heard someone say that his armies were gathering. Not sure where they are this moment, though.”

Leif nodded. “Heard, too,” Wayland said, barely above a whisper, “that someone who should have brought him to fight, and beaten him…didn’t manage it.”

“Elblai,” Leif said, in a matching whisper.

“Saying is,” Wayland said, “she got bounced.” And he spat in the fire again.

Leif thought quietly for a second, watching Wayland go back to clenching down the nails of the horseshoe. He finished the last one, then dropped the hammer and picked up a big rough file, and started rasping the edges of the nails down. “Wayland,” Leif said, “would you have time to talk a little later?”

“Surely,” Wayland said after a moment. “Why not?”

“Somewhere quiet.”

“You know the Scrag End down in Winetavern Street? Between the second and third walls, going sunward from the gates.”

“The place with the beehive outside it? Yeah.”

“After dark, then?”

“Fine. Two hours after sunset be all right?”

“Fine.” Wayland straightened up from his work. “Well, then, youngster…”

Leif raised a hand in casual farewell, and walked away through the market, looking idly at the few things still laid out on the stalls: bolts of cloth, a last few tired-looking cheeses.

He was glad to have run into Wayland. The man was a noticing type, worth knowing. Leif had known him for quite a while, since his first battle in Sarxos after picking up the healing-stone. They had in fact met in a field hospital, since farriers, skilled with hot metal and the cautery, were much in demand on battlefields where magic-workers couldn’t be found. Wayland had been surprisingly gentle with the men he had been treating, for all that the treatment itself was brutal. He missed little of the detail of what was going on around him, and had a phenomenal memory. At the moment, Leif was glad of the possibility to talk over Sarxonian matters with someone besides Megan. A variety of viewpoints never hurt.

He wandered back out in the direction of the cookshop. And his heart jumped inside him as someone tapped his shoulder from behind.

He spun away from the tap, as his mother had taught him, and came around with his hand on his knife.

It was Megan.

She gave Leif a wry look. “I thought you said you were going to meet me inside the cookshop.”

“Oh…sorry. I got distracted. I ran into somebody I knew.”

“You mean you haven’t been in to pig out on the chili yet?”

His stomach abruptly growled. “Chili,” he said.

Megan grinned. “Come on,” she said — and then paused at the sound of a voice raised in peculiar song on the other side of the market stalls.

“What the frack is that?” Megan said. The voice was accompanying itself on something very like a ukelele.

Now I will sing of the doleful maid,

And a doleful maid was she,

Who lost her love to the merman’s child

In the waves of the great salt sea—

The owner of the voice, if you could call it that, came wandering out among the awnings and the tables, trailed by the raucous laughter and catcalls of some of the stall-keepers as the song got ruder. Its source was the dwarf in the noisy motley. He paused by one of the stalls, a fruit stall in the process of being packed up, and began strumming rather atonal chords one-handed, while trying to snatch pieces of fruit with the other. The fruit-seller, a big florid woman with a walleye, finally lost her temper and hit the dwarf over the head with an empty basket. He fell over, picked himself up again, and scampered away, laughing a nasty little high-pitched laugh reminiscent of a cartoon cockroach.

Megan stared after him. “What was that?” Leif said to the fruit-seller.

“Gobbo,” said the fruit-seller.

“Sorry?” Megan said.

“Gobbo. That’s Duke Mengor’s poxy little dwarf. Some kind of minstrel he is.”

“No kind of minstrel, madam, not with that voice,” said one of the butcher’s men who was going by with a quarter beef-carcass on his back.

“Some kind of jester, too,” said the fruit-seller. “And some kind of nuisance. Always running around, picking and thieving and looking for trouble. Getting under people’s skirts…”

“You’re just jealous ’cause he didn’t want to get under your skirt, madam,” said another of the stall-keepers who was packing up.

The fruit-seller rounded on the man and began to assail his ears with such a flow of language that the stall-keeper hurriedly vanished behind someone else’s stall. Leif chuckled a little and turned back toward Attila’s. Megan stood there a moment, gazing off toward where the dwarf had vanished.

“I don’t know why,” she said to Leif, “but he looks familiar….”

“Yeah….” Leif looked where she did, and then said, “I’ll tell you why. You saw him in Minsar.”

“I did? Maybe I did.” Then she remembered the strange little figure with the sword, running through the torchlit marketplace, laughing that bizarre little laugh. She shuddered — she couldn’t quite figure out why. “If he was all the way over there,” she said softly, “what’s he doing all the way over here of a sudden?”

Leif took her arm and tugged her toward Attila’s. “Look,” he said, “we were all the way over there, and now we’re all the way over here. Nothing odd about it.”

“You sure?” Megan said.

She watched Leif get that thinking look…and slowly the look began to shift into something else: suspicion.

“I wonder,” he said.

“So do I. But first things first,” Megan said, and this time it was she who took Leif’s arm. “It’s tough to wonder on an empty stomach.”

“All right,” he said. “And then…afterwards…we have a meeting.”

“Oh?”

“Come on…I’ll tell you all about it. Assuming I can talk at all while we’re eating. This chili is so hot—”

“How hot is it?”

“They use it to discipline dragons.”

“Come on. I’m ready!”

About an hour later, they were both sitting alone in a corner at Attila’s, trying to recover from their dinner. “I can’t believe I ate that,” Megan said. “I can’t believe I ate that twice.” She was looking at the remains of her second bowl.

Leif chuckled, and had a swig of his drink. There was no cure for Attila’s chili except cold sweet tea with cream, so both of them were drinking that, out of tall ceramic cups.

“I feel sorry for the dragons you were mentioning,” Megan said.

Leif cocked an eye at the window. “It’s getting close enough to sunset,” Leif said. “We should probably go ahead.”

“Okay. But finish telling me what you started to,” Megan said, “about Wayland.”

“Oh, no, I was finished.”

“It was something about his name.”

“Oh, that…it’s a just a generic name for a wandering smith. A small joke. But he’s a good one. And he gets around. He hears a lot. There was something else I was going to mention before we went to see him, though.”

Leif glanced around them. The lady who owned Attila’s had gone out to stand in the cool of the approaching evening, leaning against the door opening into the marketplace plaza, where she was chatting with some passerby.

Leif said quietly, “Before I came into Sarxos today, I wanted to do some work on something else that occurred to me.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you said that there had to be some more systematic way to go about this search for the ‘bouncer.’ It seemed to me that you were right. So I thought, if it’s not a question of who’s beating Argath in battle — because plainly we’re meant to think that it is — then the question becomes who, what player or character, has also been beaten in battles or skirmishes by the same people? By all the same people who’ve beaten Argath?”

Megan looked at him thoughtfully. “See,” Leif said, “you have to consider the problem as if it were a problem in set theory, something you could set up as a Venn diagram, something that looks sort of like a Sarxos version of a MasterCard logo. You have to look at the whole history of battle in Sarxos for a couple of years, to see where there are overlaps in terms of who was fighting who. And the overlaps have to be exact, for the cover to be successful. Do you follow me?”

Megan blinked and then nodded. She knew analysis was one of Leif’s strong points; it was just slightly startling to see him pull it out of the hat like this. “Okay,” she said. “So what did you find?”

“Well, to begin with, the business of having battles in Sarxos isn’t terribly organized. It’s not like there’s a set schedule or anything. But there is a tendency for members of a given group of players to fight most of the other members of the same group — the groupings being loosely based on area. Partly it’s just the logistics of the game. It’s costly in terms of weeks of game-time to move large numbers of people, large armies, from one end of Sarxos to the other. It’s just not logistically feasible. When’s the last time you heard of a North Continent-South Continent battle?”

Megan shook her head. “I don’t think I ever have.”

“There was one,” Leif said, “but it was twelve years ago, game-time, and it bankrupted both sides. Worse, no one even actually won it — it came out a stalemate, because several countries on the borders of both the North Continent and South Continent realms that were fighting took that opportunity to attack the countries that were attacking each other. It was a situation kind of like the one during the American Revolution, but much worse: the way France and the Netherlands and other countries, diplomatically or in the field, took the opportunity to gang up on Britain while Britain was trying to have a war with the United States.

“But anyway, ’tween-continent wars just don’t seem to happen here anymore; there’s no percentage in it.” Leif leaned back in his seat. “So you’ll get countries who can raise enough people for armies — which is most of them; everyone loves to fight, and half the people in Sarxos are here for ‘battlefield work’—and who, over the course of the late spring-summer-early autumn campaign season, tend to fight everyone else available during that period. They end up going to war with practically everyone in that ‘league’ or ‘group,’ simply because they’re physically close. The ‘leagues’ are pretty evenly spread across the total play area.”

“Isn’t that a little weird?”

“In the real world, maybe it is. But here…I sat down with the map of Sarxos, and I noticed something very interesting about what Rodrigues did when he was building this place. He made sure there are no populated areas completely lacking in strategic value. No matter where you live, no matter what country you’ve inherited or conquered, there’s always something useful about it. But more to the point, there’s always somewhere more interesting, someplace with things you could use, just over the horizon or the hill. You’ll have one rich country sandwiched between two or three smaller, poorer ones. Or a big, powerful country will find itself surrounded by a number of other countries that just aren’t feasible for it to attack. Look at Errint, for example. Argath is just over that way, and he should have found it easy to overrun this place with his big armies, but he can’t because of the mountain range between him and Errint. Its passes were apparently very carefully placed to make invasion difficult.”

“Built-in frustration,” Megan said.

“More than just that, I think,” Leif said. “Rod in his infinite wisdom”—Leif glanced at the ceiling with an amused look—“has built the seeds of conflict into this place. But also the seeds of stability, to keep everything balanced. He’s been very subtle about it.”

“Did you figure all this out yourself?” Megan said, both impressed and amused.

“Huh? Most of it,” Leif said. “A couple of books have been written on Sarxos, but by and large the authors didn’t know what they were talking about, or they got caught up in the wonder of the external details, the computer interface and the points system and all, and never got into any depth.”

“Well, it all sounds like good sense to me,” Megan said. “If you’re a game designer, you want to make sure your players don’t get bored. Though I’ll say that Sarxos doesn’t seem to be in any danger of that.”

“True enough. But Rod has been sneaky about it. Leaving Arstan and Lidios out of the equation — they’re special cases because of the ‘gunpowder rule,’ and mostly they fight each other rather than other countries — it seems to me as if there are two alternating sets of pressures in the game. One is brought to bear by the players. They want to keep things working the way they’re working, by and large, and they only want things to change in ways that suit them. The other set of pressures, I think, come from Rod: pressures to make sure that situations that are static don’t stay static forever, and to keep things which are changing from changing too quickly, or too much. If you look at the abstracts of play for the last ten game-years, you get a sense that here and there, Sarxos is being given a nudge…a kick. A trend will start going in one direction in one country — remember that slavery thing in Dorlien? — and then something will happen to sort of nudge the place back on course. Or another place will have behaved the same way for a long time, and something will happen, all of a sudden, seemingly just at the right moment, to push it off the tracks and off in a completely new direction.”

Megan paused for a moment. “It sounds like a great way to keep things going. But you’re not suggesting,” she said, her face changing suddenly, “that these bounces — are themselves some kind of ‘nudge’? You don’t think that Rodrigues — that Rod…”

Leif looked at her, nodding slowly. “I was wondering,” he said, “if that conclusion would be one you would reach, too.”

Megan sat and thought. “You know,” she said, “paranoia is a terrible thing. It starts creeping in everywhere.”

“Yeah,” Leif said. “But the question remains: Is this just paranoia, or not? If the Argath connection is actually a cover for something, for someone’s revenge for some grudge, or something else more obscure, then, from the way things look to me, they first sat down and did a most careful analysis on the game — on the structure of the game and the way it’s set up to run — looking to see where they could most effectively interfere, and how they could interfere so that it could best be blamed on somebody else. If you’re saying that one person in a good position to do that would be the game designer himself, the one who runs the place…”

Megan shook her head, troubled. “A lot of other people would be in that position, too.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s a possibility we’ve got to consider.”

Megan started turning her teacup around and around. “A gamesmaster can run his game however he likes…but why would he start bouncing his paying customers? Without motivation, the theory won’t hold water.”

“It’s not a theory yet. Just a possibility.”

“Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t dignify it with even that term, I don’t think.” But then Megan shrugged. There was no point in running this into the ground right now. “So let’s get less specific. You sound pretty sure now that someone else besides Argath is responsible for the bounces. You think that it’s somebody who has been defeated by all the same people that Argath has been defeated by. Fine. How many people is that?”

“Six,” Leif said. “Generals or commanders named Hunsal, Orieta, Walse, Rutin, Lateran, and Balk the Screw.”

“What a name,” Megan said.

“Yeah. Well, when you analyze the data this way, you get a little help, because all these players are ‘based’ in the northeastern North Continent area. Either their cities, realms, or armies are there, or the battles took place in that ‘league area.’”

“Sounds like this analysis increases the chances of the real ‘bouncer’ being one of those six people. If not Argath.”

“That’s right. At least, that’s how it looks to me. Can you think of any other way to read it?”

Megan shook her head. “Not instantly. I’d still want to look at the hard data for myself…but it would be second-guessing. This is your specialty, and if this is the way you see it, I’m willing to buy in.”

“Great. So that would seem to be our next line of investigation, then,” Leif said. “Oh — you did get your report ready for Winters, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. He should be getting it. Wait a minute. Game intervention,” Megan said to the air.

“Waiting.”

“Time check, home base.”

“Nine forty-three P.M.”

“Finished. Fifteen minutes ago,” Megan said to Leif. “And how about you?”

“Oh, yeah, mine’s on timed release — he’ll have it in an hour or so.”

“And this line of investigation?” Megan said, looking at him with a sly expression. “Did you tell him about this new information you’ve dug up?”

“Um, well…”

“We’re holding out on him to see what we can do first, huh?” Megan said.

“Well, that seems consonant with what we discussed earlier…doesn’t it?”

Megan felt just slightly inclined to squirm. At the same time, she also felt that they might really be onto something here. “Look, let’s just run with this for a day or two more,” Leif said. “We’re so close, I know it. And with no new battles really imminent…”

“I agree with you about following up on this for another day or so,” Megan said, “but not on the false premise that there are no battles coming right away. We can’t assume that those are going to have anything to do with our ‘bouncer’ attacking anyone or refraining from attacking them. I think he’s going to bounce anybody he likes, now, whenever he’s good and ready, and I’d like to do as much work on this as I can tonight. After we talk to Wayland, we should get right in touch with Fettick, and then our next time in here, with Duchess Morn. We’ve got to make sure they’re warned, and that they believe the warning.”

“Yeah. Then we need to start talking to those six generals,” said Leif, “or talking to people about them. It’s going to use a lot of transit, but…” He shrugged.

“Yeah, well, you can split some of the footwork with me,” Megan said. “I’ve got some transit — not as much as you have, maybe, but this is important. But we need to get our butts in gear. It may take time to gather enough information about these six to find out which of them is the most likely to be the bouncer.”

“And then what do we do? If we’re sure we’ve found the right person, that is?”

“Call Net Force,” Megan said. “Hand them everything we’ve got, and tell them to go get that bouncer.”

“I would very much want to insist on being in at the ‘kill’,” Leif said.

“Insist? To whom? Winters?” Megan gave him a skeptical look. “You want an estimate of your chances at getting away with that?”

“Uh. Well…I’d real strongly suggest it, anyway. Just for satisfaction’s sake.”

“It would be nice to be there, or here, when it happens,” Megan said. “I wouldn’t count on it myself. I think the ‘grownups’ may want us safely out of the way. But satisfaction? There’ll be plenty of that when they throw the ‘bouncer’ in the can.” The image of Elblai’s face as she was taken into the hospital, her violet eyes closed, her face covered with bruising, was very much with Megan. “And either way, we’ll get the glory. Net Force’ll know who did the legwork.”

“Fair enough. Come on,” Leif said, and got up, stretching. “Let’s get out of here and go see Wayland.”

They made their way to the Scrag End slowly and carefully. The streets were very dark, and the moon, though already up, had not yet risen high enough to shed much light over the walls. Leif and Megan walked cautiously over the cobblestones, listening as they went. It was not that Errint was an unsafe city, as Sarxos went. But any town might have its occasional footpad hiding in the shadows, someone who might like to relieve you of your purse or any goods you were carrying. In fact, there was a substantial thieves’ guild in Sarxos, people who led utterly respectable lives in the real world, but who spent their recreational time skulking in alleys, dressing in rags, gibbering to each other in thievish cant, and generally doing things that, in their normal lives, would be terribly unsocial, but in Sarxos were just plain fun, and considered part of the landscape, like dog droppings on a New York sidewalk.

A nasty snicker of laughter down an alley brought Megan’s head up. Leif paused, looking down into the darkness, and Megan said a word under her breath. “Very interesting,” she said after a moment.

Leif couldn’t see anything, but the voice was familiar. “Who was that?” he asked.

“Our little friend again,” Megan said. “Gobbo, the singing dwarf.”

“Oh, really,” Leif said.

“Would have thought he’d be up in the castle, doing whatever jesters do for his boss,” Megan said.

“He might be doing an errand. I think that kind of thing is in the job description.”

“Huh,” said Megan, not sounding particularly convinced. “Well, come on.”

They walked on, went through a gate between two walls, and headed down yet another dark curve of narrow street. Leif paused. Megan kept on going.

“Whoa,” he said. “This is it.”

Megan stopped, and looked up and down the street. “What is it?”

“This.”

Leif remembered Megan referring to the Pheasant and Firkin as a dive. As they paused outside the front of the Scrag End, with the moon very gradually looking over the top of the outermost wall, Megan stared at the structure sticking out into the street, with its cracked wooden shingles and iron-bound, axe-pocked door.

“This looks like somebody’s shed!” she said.

“It might have been, once,” Leif said. “Come on in.”

He banged on the door. A little rectangular iron slit at about eye height slid aside on the inside of the door, and a ray of dim light, blocked by the shadow of a head, sprang out of it into the dark street. Two narrowed eyes peered through the slit at Leif.

“Wayland,” Leif said.

The little door slid shut, and there was a sound inside of a wooden bolt being slid aside and lifted out of its cradle. “High tech,” Megan said under her breath.

Leif chuckled. The door swung ponderously outward, and first Leif, then Megan, slipped through the opening.

Leif watched Megan look around, and thought he saw her finish the thought, It is a shed! So it probably had been — a biggish one that might have been attached to one of the old stables which had been located in this area. The floor was the same cobblestone as out in the street, and the walls were ancient, blackened, cracked planks of wood butted together edge-to-edge, daubed here and there with some kind of plaster in an unsuccessful attempt to seal up the cracks. There were four or five small plain wooden tables, each with a rushlight holder, and a curtained doorway opening into some kind of service area behind the main room: probably where the beer barrels were kept.

The man who had opened the door for them, a strikingly tall and handsome young man in a grubby smock and breeches, incongruously balding on top, with long hair tied neatly back behind, finished shutting and rebolting the door, looked them up and down, and vanished behind that curtained door. At a table at the very back of the room, near that door, sat Wayland. He had a mug in front of him, and two mugs waiting on the table.

They sat down at Wayland’s table. Leif nodded at him, then glanced at the two mugs.

“Saw you in Attila’s,” said Wayland. Then he glanced over at Megan. “I think we’ve met, though.”

“I think so too,” Megan said, reaching out to touch hands with him, the accepted greeting. “Summer festival in Lidios, wasn’t it? The market.”

“That’s right, Brown Meg. My usual stand. Two years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“You were in Lidios?” Leif said to Megan, slightly surprised. “What were you doing there?”

“Slumming,” Megan said, smiling slightly. “I wanted to take a look at the place. But once was enough.”

“Anyway, be welcome,” Wayland said. They lifted the mugs and drank the thin pale Errint beer, more like nearbeer than anything else.

“I just came up from down that way,” Wayland said. “Place is stirred-up as a hornet’s nest.”

“What for?”

“News about what’s going on up here,” Wayland said, and took another drink, as if to get rid of a bad taste. “This whole business with the Duke descending on us from out of the blue, trying to pressure poor Fettick into an alliance with Argath.” Wayland shook his head. “A lot of other countries up this way, six or seven of the little ones, have been getting a lot of pressure all of a sudden to make alliances. Somebody seems to be in a big hurry about it.”

“Why?” Megan said. “Who do you think he’s afraid of?”

“Don’t know that it’s afraid,” Wayland said. “More like angry, I think.”

He leaned back on the bench, against the splintery wall, and studied his drink. “I was down Arstan and Lidios way, as I said, and I stopped on the way up to do some post work—”

“Post?” Megan said.

“Oh, aye,” Wayland said. “The Swift-Post system has an eastern spur that runs up from the Lidians to Orxen and out around the Daimish Peninsula. Their dispatch hub is at Gallev, about — what would it be? A hundred leagues south of here. Sometimes, if I’m between jobs, or I need a little extra hard silver, I stop there and shoe the post-horses. It’s steady work. There are always post-riders coming in and out, special couriers, and the like.”

He took another swig of beer. “This time out, though, I was there ’bout midsummer. They like to take advantage of the long days that time of year so they can add day riders to the schedule, and there are always more private courier-riders going up and down then, same reason. You’ll see maybe one every couple of hours. This one day, there were four separate couriers down from Argath, all wearing his device, all in Rod’s own hurry. Two didn’t stop, two stopped to change horses and went on again. Not without dropping a word or two about what they were up to — you know how it is, must be boring work riding post, they like to impress people with how important they are. Idiots.

“Well, two of those posts — one of the ones that didn’t stop, one of the ones that did — came straight from Argath’s hand at the Black Palace and were going straight to Gerna city in Toriva.”

“What, to King Sten?” Leif asked.

“No, no. To his war-leader, Lateran.”

Leif suddenly became rather interested in his beer. Megan raised her eyebrows. “Don’t know the man.”

Wayland shrugged. “Another hot young general on the way up. Some brilliant victories, since a couple of years ago. Some against Argath, too. Pretty embarrassing ones, skirmishes — around then, people started looking at Argath and saying, ‘Maybe he’s slipping.’ Some people think that started this whole trouble with Elblai up north.” Wayland shook his head. “So suddenly there are all these posts going back and forth. And the one post-rider who stopped, he said that the other rider, the one who didn’t stop, was carrying the Black Arrow.”

Megan, too, became interested in her beer. Leif did his best to stretch nonchalantly. The Black Arrow was a North-continent tradition, a declaration of blood feud to the death.

“Maybe Argath got tired of being beaten,” Leif said.

“Don’t know if it’s just that,” said Wayland. He drank, and put his mug down. “But this…this is what you were asking me about, in a way. Yes?”

Leif nodded. “You said about Elblai…that she was bounced.”

“That’s what I heard,” said Wayland. “News does travel fast.”

Leif nodded. In a medieval setting, news might take days or weeks to get from one place to another, but this was a medieval setting with e-mail. Post-riders were still needed, but for carrying physical artifacts rather than news.

“That battle’s not going to happen now,” Wayland said. “But suddenly…it seems like the word is that Argath’s turning his attention south, toward Toriva, toward Lateran.”

“Why the change?” Megan said softly.

Leif looked at Wayland. Just as softly, Wayland said, “You were never the kind to meddle, young Leif. What’s your interest with this? You going to take up with one side against the other? Doesn’t seem like a good thing to get caught up in.”

Leif sat quiet a moment, looked sideways at Megan.

Very slightly, she nodded.

“Not so much for or against any side,” Leif said. “We want to find who’s doing these bounces.”

Wayland nodded. “A lot of people would like to know that. This last one…” He shook his head. “Bad business. This isn’t why Rod created the Game. Not that any of these ‘bounces’ have been good at all. Somebody spends a year, two years, five, building up a character, being someone, and then all of a sudden—” He made a finger-flicking gesture, like somebody knocking a crumb off the table. “Gone. Just like that. All the work, all the friendships. It stinks.” His voice was soft, but vehement.

“It does,” Leif said. “Listen.”

He sketched out briefly for Wayland what he and Megan had been discussing — the possibility that Argath was merely a blind for someone else’s grudges against players who had beaten him or her in battle. And he mentioned the names of the generals and commanders who had lost campaigns to all the players Argath had lost to: Hunsal, Rutin, Orieta, Walse, Balk the Screw…and Lateran.

Wayland got a sideways smile at that. “Now that is very interesting,” he said. “Very. I wonder, does anyone else think this? Has anyone else looked as deep into this as they should?”

“We’re trying,” Megan said. “Before the Game gets ruined for everybody. It is still a game…it’s not supposed to end up in the emergency room.”

Wayland nodded. After a moment, he sighed, and said, “I’ll help if I can. I move on in a day. I was going east again. But I could go west and south instead. This time of year, if a man enjoys the summer weather, he has a right to change his mind….”

“If you could do that, it would be a help. And if you find anything out—”

“I’ll e-mail you.”

“There’s still one thing we’ve got to do before we leave here,” Megan said. “We’ve got to talk to Lord Fettick…try to warn him that he’s probably a target. I just wish we knew someone here who would vouch for us. The last time we had to do this, it didn’t work too well.”

Wayland grinned. “But you do have someone. You have me. I do Fettick’s horses. Just finished doing them this morning. Before I go tomorrow, if you like, I’ll take you up to the major-domo at the High House and introduce you. Can’t do it tonight, I fear…they’ll be up there with the Duke again, partying. That business with his young daughter…” Wayland shook his head.

“They’re not actually going to marry her off to him, are they?” Megan said, sounding very dubious.

“Her? Oh, no, surely not. Fettick dotes on her. He’d choke herself sooner than let her leave at such a tender age. Or any age, maybe, so the rumor goes…but it’d be some years before that would become a problem. Though little Dame Senel has a mind of her own, they say. Meanwhile, Fettick has to speak the Duke fair to keep him from doing anything rash or sudden…for the time being. He’s hoping, I think, that things will change quickly enough in this part of Sarxos that the Duke won’t be a problem for him any more.”

“If we can find out what we need to,” Leif said, “that might just happen.”

Wayland stretched. “All right. Tomorrow morning, then — I’ll meet you in the marketplace. I won’t be moving the cart out of the city until I’m actually ready to leave.”

“Great. Thanks, Wayland.”

Wayland lifted a hand in casual farewell and headed for the door. The young man came out of the back room and let him out into the dark street, then closed the door again.

They stayed long enough to finish their beer, then headed out into the street themselves, and started walking slowly back toward the marketplace. “Pity we couldn’t take care of this tonight,” Megan said.

Leif shrugged. “Never mind. Are you going to be able to log in tomorrow morning, early? That’s when we’ll need to take care of this.”

“Shouldn’t be any problem. Mornings are quiet around my place. It’s evenings that’re the…”

She suddenly fell silent.

“Huh?” Leif said.

“It’s nothing,” she said in a low voice. “Just keep walking.”

“It’s not nothing. What is it?”

“It’s evenings that’re the problem,” Megan went on loudly, looking sideways down an alley as they passed it. “My father can be an incredible nuisance about family nights. It’s him again,” she whispered.

“Oh, well, fathers,” Leif said as they walked. Megan saw that he, too, was trying to look down the alley she had been looking down, without seeming to do so. But he still looked baffled. I guess my night vision must be better than his…. “They’re pains, but you can’t live without them, and you can’t shoot them…Him, who?”

“Gobbo,” she whispered. “Once might be a coincidence…twice might be an accident…but three times is enemy action.”

“Sorry?”

“He’s following us.”

“Are you sure?”

“He has to be. And you know what? He’s been following us since Minsar.”

“It could be paranoia, Megan.”

“It’s not.” She turned suddenly into another alleyway, and pulled Leif in after her. For a moment they both leaned against one of the damp stone walls in the dead silence.

Not quite dead. A scurry of feet, then nothing. Then another scurry, closer.

“Down there,” Leif whispered.

“Maybe he is. I’m not waiting. I don’t like being followed…it makes me want to practice dwarf-chucking.”

“What?”

“Dwarf-chucking. A very old and very incorrect sport. My mother would be shocked to even hear me mention it.” Megan grinned, and looked around them. “Where are we?”

“Between the third and fourth walls.”

“No, I mean which way is east?”

Well ahead of them, leftward against one stone wall, was a patch of moonlight. Leif pointed off to the right.

“Oh, yeah,” Megan said softly, and thought for a moment. Being an incurable map-reader, Megan had had a good look at the game’s stored map of Errint before coming in today. Now she compared the spot where they stood with her memory of the map, and considered for another second or so.

“All right,” she whispered then. “There’s a gate in the wall to your left about sixty yards ahead. It goes through into the next circle. I’m going to leave you. Count thirty seconds and then follow me. Walk down the middle of the street. Don’t stop at the gate. Just keep going.”

“What are you going to do?”

She smiled. And she vanished.

Leif stared. She had not used game-based magic — there was a typical aura, a feel in the air, associated with magic use at close range, which he would have detected. But very quietly, very simply, between one blink and one breath and the next, Megan had stopped being where he had thought she should have been. It was a little unnerving.

One, two, three, he thought, wondering as always whether his seconds were as accurate as he thought they were. Leif listened to the sleeping city, listened hard. Somewhere, up high, a bat made its tiny squee-squee-squee of sonar, possibly targeting bugs attracted to the lights still burning in the windows of the towers of the High House. Nothing else moved.

Scuffle…scurry.

Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, Leif thought. Nineteen, twenty…

Out in the open country, there was a brief, distant, astonishing burst of sweet-voiced song. A nightingale. It ran its descant through to its end, almost making Leif forget where he was in his counting. For a moment, the scurrying stopped. Then it started again.

— twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty—

Leif stepped out into the street and began walking calmly down toward the gate. He was not particularly calm. Errint was a city where it was permissible to carry weapons within the walls, so he had a knife. He was good enough with it to make serious trouble for anyone who tried anything, and he had enough general self-defense training to make him feel comfortable in any large real-world city. But this was not any large real-world city. This was Sarxos, and you never knew when someone was going to jump at you out of a dark alley carrying a loaded cockatrice…against which front snap-kicks would do you no good at all.

Leif walked on, resisting the temptation to whistle. It might make you feel better in the dark, but it also pinpointed your location for someone whose night vision might be no better than yours. He strolled, as calmly as he could, and passed the square of moonlight on the left-hand wall, just a thin ray of it passing between two taller buildings on the east side. The gate Megan had mentioned was maybe another twenty yards on. Very, very quietly, Leif reached down and started loosening his knife in its sheath.

Behind him, very softly, something went scuffle.

He didn’t stop to look behind, though he was sorely tempted. Leif kept walking. His mother’s voice said in his head, No common thug ever sneaks up right behind you. They always break into a run, those last few steps. If it’s a professional stalking you, you don’t have a hope. You’re probably dead already. But if it’s just a thug, so long as you can’t hear those last few steps, you’ve still got at least a few feet between you and him or her. When you hear those steps, though, they’re in reaching range. Do something quick—

Leif just went strolling on.

Scurry. Scuffle—pause—scurry, pause—

He kept walking.

There was the gate, a faint, wide, arched dimness in the darkness of the left-hand wall. Leif walked innocently past it, not turning his head to look through it, just taking his time: though he could see by peripheral vision that no one was there.

Scuffle.

Footsteps. Soft shoes on the stones. Much closer now.

Leif swallowed.

Scurry, scuffle—

— and someone breaking into a run—

Leif whirled, whipping the knife out, going forward just enough on the balls of his feet to jump or run.

He never had a chance to do either. A dark shape shot out of the gateway and got jumbled up with the very small dark blot that had been running at him. Leif was uncertain what happened next, except that the two dark forms seemed to consolidate…and then one of them flew away from the other, and into the wall opposite the gate, with stunning force. There was a shriek, cut off suddenly as the smaller form slid down the wall and hit the cobblestones.

Leif hurried over. Megan was standing there, not even looking particularly winded. She was standing over that smaller shape now, her hands on her hips, looking down with an expression that was hard to make out in the darkness, but it looked thoughtful.

“He weighs nearly as much as my number-three brother,” she said mildly. “Interesting. All right, Gobbo, get up off your butt, it wasn’t that bad.”

The dwarf lay moaning and sniveling on the ground. “Don’t hurt me, don’t do that again!”

Megan reached down and hoisted Gobbo up by the front of his motley, and briefly held him straight-armed against the wall at nearly eye level. She and Leif studied his face. It was that of a middle-aged man, much collapsed together because of his dwarfism: a nasty face, eloquent of much troublemaking.

“I’m a very important person, I can get you in a lot of trouble!” the dwarf squealed. “Let me go!”

“Oh, yeah,” Leif said, “we’re shaking, the two of us. Was that dwarf-chucking?” he said to Megan.

“Very incorrect,” she said, in an abstracted tone of voice. “But you could get used to it.”

The dwarf’s face spasmed with fear. “Don’t!”

“Why were you following us?” Leif said.

“And why have you been following us since Minsar?” said Megan. “Answers, quick — or I’ll chuck you right over this wall, honest, and we’ll see how important gravity thinks you are when you come down.”

“What makes you think—”

Megan lifted him a little higher.

“Your arm getting tired?” Leif said. “I could take him. I can press almost one-fifty these days.”

“No,” Megan said, “no need. I won’t wait much longer. Gobbo, this is your last chance. I saw a lady get hurt today, and it’s put me in a real bad mood, and made me short-tempered with people who don’t answer reasonable questions.” She started to lift him higher.

The dwarf looked at her, a strange expression. “Put me down,” he said, “and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Megan looked at him for a moment, then put him down.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

The dwarf began feeling around in his pockets. Megan was watching him like a hawk. Leif was wondering what those pockets might conceal—

“Here,” the dwarf said, and reached up, holding out something for Megan to take.

She reached down her hand and took it, curious. She lifted it close to her eyes, turning it over and over in the dimness. It looked like a coin, except that its edges were smooth, not milled. It was not made of metal either. It was a circle of some dark mineral, with a design engraved on it. Megan held it up toward another of the squares of moonlight high up on a nearby wall, and looked at it, through it. So did Leif. He caught a wink of the darkest red, even in this silver light. The thing was made of pigeon’s blood ruby, and deeply engraved in it, in an old uncial font, was the letter S.

Megan looked at Leif with an odd expression on her face. “Game intervention,” she said.

“Listening.”

“Identify this object.”

“Object is identified as the Creator’s Token,” said the computer voice. “The Sigil of Sarxos — positive in-game identification of the game designer and copyright holder.”

Both of them looked down at the dwarf in complete astonishment.

“Yes,” Gobbo said, in an entirely different voice. “I’m Chris Rodrigues.”