Parting the crowd, the kobold shaman Rvg’har hobbled up to me and offered in his shaking paw a bag tied up with woven grass string.
“May your friend drink this, chosen one of the Sleeping Gods,” he squeaked. “It will cleanse his mind of the alcohol’s stupor.”
A quarter of an hour later, Gyula sat opposite me on the temple steps, still grieving, but sober. He drank steaming halfling coffee out of a big clay cup. Behemoth appeared, nodded in understanding to me and disappeared again—soon we’d need to have a longer and more in-depth conversation.
“We found out when Hairo came with his people,” Gyula said quietly, staring into space. “We walked between the rooms, and that Japanese guy… What was his name?”
“Yoshi?”
“Yeah, right. He installed those mental blocks, put something like a ring on everyone’s head and asked them to repeat some words back to him… I forgot what they were, like some kind of oath. When we reached Raul’s room, nobody answered. I wasn’t surprised. Figured he was sleeping in. We were all tired after restoring the temple and starting the fort upgrade…” Gyula fell silent, staring off into the distance. Nothing fell down his weather-beaten rotting cheek. The undead don’t cry, but he was certainly crying in real life. “Raul was young. Just a little older than you. He lived alone. Moved from his mother’s place in the Guyana Cesspit. I brought him up… You know, I have a daughter, and I always dreamed of having a son…”
They broke down the flimsy door. Raul lay motionless in his bed. No pulse. Sergei connected up a portable diagnostic apparatus, but it broke down, gave an error. It couldn’t tell them the cause of death. There was uproar. Gyula and Manny gathered everyone not on duty in Dis. Then they found out that Malcolm didn’t wake up either, and another three, although breathing, couldn’t be woken. Hairo decided to take them to a clinic that asks no questions, but first he contacted me.
“And all five worked with you in the desert?”
“Exactly. Agnes flew with them to the hospital,” Gyula continued. “That’s Tadeusz’s wife. He’s one of the sick ones. She called me from there. The men are in a coma. How did she put it… Necrotic alterations with subsequent rejection of internal organs. The doctors are at a loss. Those damn butchers! Dro! My boys… they’re all dead men, Alex!”
“How do you feel?”
“Don’t feel nothin’!” the builder spat angrily. “I ain’t getting no necrosis. It’s because of my capsule, right?”
“I think so, yeah.” I looked away, unable to bear the pain in his eyes.
If we were right, and it was the capsules that were to blame for the citizens’ deaths… If I so much as hinted at it, I was a dead man. Snowstorm might as well have been the UN. The government wouldn’t allow that information to be revealed. Follow the logic and you came to the conclusion that the powers that be were introducing the new race in order to cleanse a population of useless people that had gotten too large, people they didn’t even treat like sentients. Biomass. Inwinova. Living dead.
“Here’s what we’re going to do, Gyula…”
I took a deep breath in, breathed out. Slowly, driving the words into the builder’s clouded consciousness, I explained why we had to stay quiet.
“So what now? Are we going to watch while others die?” he asked bitterly. “If the race is opened to noncitizens, everyone will switch to it! No fatigue, you can work in extreme climates, immunity to poisons… No worker would refuse all that! Especially since you can still enjoy drinking and eating, but have no pain…”
“No, we won’t just watch. No matter what I say now, I won’t be believed. Nobody cares about the fate of some, sorry to say it, Gyula,—some inwinova. People will say it’s fake, that the workers just poisoned themselves with industrial alcohol. They’ll invent something. All the media of the world is working on them, along with millions of journalists, bloggers, opinion leaders… And then I’ll have some terrible accident. And so will you. So will all of us. No. We can’t allow that.”
“Then wiiat…?”
“We’ll fight ‘within the bounds of the gameplay’ and break the dro and all their plans… Who’s this?”
A sewer trogg was hanging around at the foot of the temple and waving a hand to me. At first I thought he was praying to Behemoth, but now I realized he was trying to get my attention.
“The tribe’s chief,” Gyula said. “Movarak. Go, talk to him. I need to think of what to do with the crew. Some of the miners wanted to change their craft. I’ll talk to them. Go, go! I’ll be fine!”
I left the reinvigorated Gyula and went to talk to the new fort resident. Massive, hunchbacked, with arms dragging on the ground like a caveman, the trogg wore an animal skin and was armed with a giant club as tall as a man. He silently waited for me to come closer, big brows drawn down in a frown on his broad forehead.
Movarak, level 227 Trogg Chieftain
Stone Rib Tribe.
“May the Sleeping Gods never wake, chosen one!” he boomed, baring big crooked teeth. “Movarak, chieftain of the troggs, greets you!”
“And may their sleep be eternal,” I answered. “Greetings, Movarak!”
He spoke clearly, with no accent and without mangling words like the kobolds did. Appearances are deceiving, as Uncle Nick used to say, and Movarak was a living demonstration—I saw wisdom and cunning in the chief s eyes, though his body said something else; here I am, primitive and dim, a joke of the gods.
He said nothing, just studied me carefully. I broke the silence.
“How are you all settling in on the island, Movarak? Need any help? I heard your tribe has
