“Ah-ceremony?” Kevin asked blankly.
“Oliver,” Snow Goose said solemnly, “we need your war club.”
“Now just a second-Ow!” Kevin was shocked back into silence.
Oliver appeared beside her, implement of destruction in hand. “All right. What is it that you need?”
“The head must be crushed, the arms and legs severed, or he will walk against us.”
“Wait just a cotton-picking-Ow! Will you stop-Ow!”
Snow Goose’s expression was mournful. “Truly, it is easier on the recently slain if they accept their new station gracefully.”
Kevin gritted his teeth and lay still. Max wasn’t watching Kevin. He was watching Oliver, who had stealthily made an adjustment on his war club. He had palmed one of the blades. An illusion now projected from the back of the war club, nasty and axelike.
“I don’t think the rest of you want to watch-” Snow Goose said. They gawked.
“Now wait just a-Ahhh!” Kevin said, mighty uncooperative for a corpse, as Oliver’s war club rose and fell, and the blade clove one of Kevin’s thin legs. The entire leg went black. Kevin stared at it. “Jesus Christ! Snow Goose? Ahh!”
The war club rose and fell again, and again, and now Kevin was armless and legless, basically a trunk murder victim still conscious enough to complain about it. He looked up at them, and sighed in resignation. “Ain’t life a bitch?”
The war club fell again. His head went black. Kevin muttered inaudible curses.
Snow Goose examined Max carefully. “You can be saved, but we must make ceremony for you.”
“Not like that, I hope to God.”
Despite herself, a grin touched her face. “No, I think we have something a little more peaceful for you.”
He tried to sit up. “Well, then, I-” A sharp shock made him lie back down again. “Let’s get on with it.”
She touched his chest with her fingertips. “No, I don’t think that you should try to get up and around, the strain could be fatal.” She turned to the others. “Stretchers! We need to move this man to a safe place!”
Several of the Adventurers dug into their backpacks, pulled out flexible shelter sections. and joined them into a makeshift stretcher.
It took five of them to carry him, and they didn’t have breath to complain. Trianna was the only woman, and she seemed as strong as Hebert. “I didn’t know cooking built that kind of muscle,” Max whispered.
She just gritted her teeth and kept going, bumpity bump.
The procession ended in a tumbled pile of slabs and blocks. It might conceivably have been a temple once, but not for any Inuit or other shamanic civilization that he could imagine.
The inside was covered with those oddly ominous symbols. Again, he had the feeling that the glyphs portrayed something important. The images were fascinating, but until they got some torches set up, it was too dark to see anything.
Snow Goose shucked her backpack and came to stand over him, hemming and hawing. “Well, Daddy said there’d be days like this.”
“Like what?”
“I’m going to have to perform a healing ceremony on you.”
“Have you done it before?”
“Only on a dog.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“The dog died.”
“On the other hand, modern miracle drugs-”
“Will avail you nothing-”
“Falling Angels stuff! Magic!”
“You have been injured by a headless one, an Amartoq. Without spiritual treatment you will die.” She turned and examined each Gamer in turn. “Any of you who have been wounded by the Amartoqs, come forward.”
Orson, Charlene, and Johnny Welsh stepped forward.
“You three, lie on the ground next to Max.”
“Not my idea of a dream date, but-” Johnny grumbled, but lay down.
Snow Goose rummaged in her pack, and after a few moments, pulled out a flat, twisted pear-shaped mask tufted with caribou hair. The mouth featured a rather surreal gap-toothed smile. One eye was closed almost to a slit. The nose seemed less a nose than a continuation of the deep eye-sockets. It was carved of some dark wood.
Snow Goose slipped the mask on. “Now the rest of you step back.”
She mumbled under her breath, and began to chant, hopping and dancing around in a great circle. Their lanterns threw odd shadows on the wall as Snow Goose moved slowly around the injured Gamers.
As she danced, she seemed to become another person, left behind the trappings of the twenty-first century. She took on a more primitive aspect, hearkening to an earlier, crueler time in human history.
Max, being very near death, rolled his eyes and strove to look the part. He wondered how many people would see the final tape, and vaguely, he wondered how much money it would make. Perhaps his agent should have looked at that release form before he signed it.
Ah, well. Money be damned, dying or not, he was a trooper. The show must go on.
He moaned, he thrashed. His body twitched in time to each of Snow Goose’s capers. The other Gamers got into the spirit of it: moaning, twitching, leaping. Damned if Orson didn’t begin to foam at the lips, and heaved with sympathetic convulsions. Orson had watched Max perform often enough…
They squatted in the shadows of that tumbled space, and chanted, and grunted, and slammed their spears and clubs and rifle butts against the ground in primal rhythm.
Snow Goose was lost in her dance… the thrum of slamming feet and the strike of the weapons, the voices rising in crude harmony.. the torches and the leaping shadows, the writhing bodies of the wounded…
It was all incredibly hypnotic. He felt his body pulsing with it, rising and falling with it, as if it called to something in him that not only had forgotten that this was a Game, but that he was a twenty-first-century man.
A part that didn’t care whether the capering of the witch doctor or shaman was fraud or fact, magic or science. A part that lost itself in the arhythmic movements, the animal postures taken on for brief moments, then abandoned.
Snow Goose’s dark hair was plastered against her head with sweat. Snow Goose came close to him. The leering mouth of her mask was momentarily shocking and disturbing, and he felt his entire body tingle Another shock through the underwear? This one was more like a trill of sensation, the same kind of quasi-musical note that he had first experienced on the plane. It was exhilarating, and frightening too.
Snow Goose screamed, shaking a bone at him, then screamed again. He arched his body in response, and opened his mouth wide, shrieking with all his strength.
Gee, that felt good.
The red stain began to fade.
Snow Goose screamed, the cacophony growing louder, and the other Gamers, stomping their feet to the rhythm, chanted.
“ Uttoe-seek,” Snow Goose said, bouncing on one leg repeatedly. “ Aypok, pinayoke, sutomok, Aiiyeee!”
And she turned to the others, and nodded, encouraging them to chant along with her. “ Uttoe-seek, aypok, pinayoke, sutomok, Hiyeee!”
Over and over, until they caught the rhythm. Max realized that she was counting up to four, over and over again.
And she hopped, first on one foot, and then the other. She bent over them, and shook her bone at them. His body tingled, and the red spot grew smaller.
“ Uttoe-seek!”
And Charlene’s body arched, and she screamed and sobbed “ Aypok!” and Orson thrashed. His hand, reflexively, reached out and found Charlene’s, and they clasped fingers. “ Pinayoke!” and there was an answering chant from the six chanting Adventurers. They slammed their weapons and their feet against the ground.
“ Sutomok, Aiyeee!”
