'This is where we ran down,' Tony said. 'What did he want that was outside the Gaming area? He broke every rule to get there. Maybe he's stealing something.'
'It would have to be small,' Harmony said. 'Gamers don't carry much out of the Games, do they?'
Tony shook his head. 'What's in MIMIC to steal?'
'Some of the spaces have been modified. Some computer systems are in, but there isn't much in them yet.'
'He could put taps on them. Now, before ScanNet goes fully operational.'
'All right, then,' Vail said, getting into the game. 'Industrial plans? Equipment? Sabotage?'
Millicent looked uneasy. ''Sabotage? Where's the profit in that?'
Harmony cleared his throat. 'You throw another country behind schedule. They can't make their deadline. Come next bidding time, you might look a whole lot better. In the long term, it could be Ecuador against Sri Lanka for the ground site of an orbital tether.'
'All right,' Vail said finally. 'We'll have to get Griffin in on this. When is the next rest break?'
'I don't know, but soon,' Harmony said. 'They've got to be dead.' He grinned wearily. 'Which is appropriate. Their next stop is a graveyard.'
34
Friday, July 22, 2059 — 5:00 P.M.
Steam rose from the wet graves like a pall, and the nine remaining Gamers, and their one remaining guide, plodded through the muck with hands up to their noses. The entire fourth level reeked of corruption.
It had taken two hours for them to creep down from the ninth level. Through stairways and hallways, avoiding things that shambled in the distance or groaned in the depths, they followed a Virtual trail of green arrows. At the end of that trail they found the graveyard, where their adventure had begun a day and a half earlier.
Muck had seeped down from the ninth level. The floor was sopping and slippery. Partially decomposed, inhuman corpses had washed from the graves and lay moist and rotting in the park lanes. Eyeless sockets stared at them; tongueless mouths screamed in silence.
Acacia held her sword ever at the ready. Captain Cipher had much of their salt supply. He sprinkled bits of it, just a pinch, on each corpse that they passed. Where the salt fell, a puff of smoke rose, reeking of corruption.
A trill of laughter wafted from across the boneyard, a sound even more inhuman than the warped and withered objects around them.
'Oh… so clever you are,' a voice called. The word 'are' dissolved from vowel sound into insane laughter. 'You have salt, and salt stops my people. So clever…'
'Twenty-toed Moses,' Cipher said. 'I wish they'd hurry up and attack. I don't know how much more of this-'
'Shhh.'
Most of the fourth level had been a park of some kind, a place where people might have come on holiday, to celebrate, to picnic. Now it was a place of stinking death, of corpses that clawed their way back from perdition.
'What do you think?' Tammi inspected one of the skeletons. 'It looks like it was changing into one of the crocodile things.' Tammi wore the Nommo crown. The Warrior-woman had powerful magic now. With the crown and the Necklace of Oggun, she was the single most powerful Adventurer.
They had tried spells to waken Mary-em's godling child, but it never stirred. 'He's just a baby,' Mary-em said sheepishly. 'Maybe he's just taking a nap.'
The entire caravan of Adventurers was suffused with Top Nun's saffron, protective radiance; it illumined the landscape, as well. The blasted, ruined graveyard was so depressing, Acacia almost wished the light would go out.
Captain Cipher's tuneless voice rang out: 'Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to die we go-'
'Is that your voice?' Al asked wearily, 'or did you have beans for lunch?'
With a sudden rumble, a tombstone rose out of the muck. A man-sized ball of cobwebs bubbled out of the mud in front of it and then began to unfurl. Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, a human being stepped forth from the ball and smiled.
He had been a man. He was part skeleton, and through gaps in his body and tattered greatcoat they could see the tombstone behind him. He had been of African blood, but there remained precious little blood in him, or flesh for it to course through.
He bowed expansively. 'Welcome to my domain,' he said. 'I am Baron Samedi.'
'Lord of the dead,' Acacia murmured.
He flexed stiltlike legs and bowed creakily. He held his hand out for hers. She held out her hand nervously, and the rotting thing touched its protruding teeth to her softness. There was just a hint of warm, sticky breath against her skin, and then he straightened.
She had regained her composure. 'Did you send the crocodile things to attack the Nommo?'
'No,' he said, smiling. 'I watch. I enjoy the spectacle.'
'Of what?'
'Of… life. All life ends here, in my domain. I enjoy watching the living ones try to forestall it for a few hours, or days, or years. It means nothing. All ends here, you know. I serve Babalu-Aye. He should have protected the dead from the
Mayombreros, but they have greater power now. Much greater. My master has become their servant.' His voice was a delighted whisper.
'Where is your master?' she asked.
'Bound. Perhaps no longer my master. We shall see.'
Top Nun crept up and whispered in Acacia's ear, ' Babalu-Aye. Protector of the sick.'
'What do you think?'
'The Mayombreros are going for the whole shmeer. We know that the gods are really just energy fields, but this one was made to heal, and to protect the dead. A sort of embalming demon, maybe? 'Baron Samedi' must be a kind of golem subprogram. Something that shmoozes with both the living and the dead, for Babalu-Aye.'
'But without any real loyalty.'
'So how could it have loyalty? It's just a golem, a robot, a made thing. Any energy that sustains it-'
'Energy…'
Top Nun's brown eyes narrowed shrewdly. 'The reactor?'
Baron Samedi stood aside, cackling, waving them on their way.
The graveyard steamed as the Adventurers entered it; mud sloshed around their ankles. The trees were as bare as wheat fields in winter, and canted sideways. A dim wind whistled through the naked branches.
A scream behind them. Panthesilea saw Top Nun, eyes rolled up in her head, ankle grabbed by something from under the muck.
Panthesilea was on her in a second, hacking and slashing at the loose soil. Top Nun screamed, 'by!' and light exploded around them both, driving the attacker back into the ground. She staggered back, panting. The rest of the Adventurers set themselves in circular array.
Here they came: crawling up from under the ground, up from the slime, creatures half human corpse and half crocodile, in states of hideous decomposition.
The Adventurers fought for their lives.
The creatures were no larger than men, but they writhed from the earth like maggots from meat, in apparently endless profusion.
But there was a new factor now: Acacia and the rest of her compatriots had survived the worst that the Mayombreros could throw at them, and their power had increased as a result.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger…
