Reamde

work on the project.”

“More high-level discussions is what I heard,” Zula put in.

“Yeah. I had to cram for these discussions by reading my Joseph Campbell, my Jung.”

“Why Jung?”

“Archetypes. We were having this big discussion about the races of T’Rain. There were reasons not to just use elves and dwarves like everyone else.”

“You mean, like—creative reasons or intellectual property reasons?”

“More the latter, but also from the creative standpoint there’s something to be said for making a clean sweep. Just creating an entirely new, original palette of races without any ties to Tolkien or to European mythology.”

“All those Chinese programmers…” Zula began.

“You’d be surprised, actually. The politically correct, campus radical take on it would be just what you’d think—”

“Elves and dwarves, c’mon, how could you be so Eurocentric?” Zula said.

“Exactly, but in a way it’s almost more patronizing to the Chinese to assume that, just because they are from China, they can’t relate to elves and dwarves.”

“Got it.”

“Turned out, though, that when we got Don Donald in here, he had good reasons why elves and dwarves were not just arbitrary races that could be swapped out for ones we made up but actual archetypes, going back…”

“How far?”

“He thinks that the elf/dwarf split was born in the era when Cro-Magnons coexisted in Europe with Neanderthals.”

“Interesting! Way back, then, like tens of thousands of years.”

“Yeah. Before even language, maybe.”

“Makes you wonder what we could find in African folklore,” she said.

This stopped Richard for a few moments, while he caught up with her. “Since there might have been even a greater diversity of, of…”

“Hominids,” she said, “going back maybe farther.”

“Why not? Anyway, we didn’t get much beyond this level in the initial set of D-squared talks. Then it all got handed off to…”

“Skeletor.”

“Yeah. But we didn’t call him that in those days, because he was still fat.” Saying that, Richard felt a brief spike of nervousness that Peter might be twittering or, God forbid, live-video-blogging this. But Peter’s attention was entirely elsewhere; he had begun keeping an eye on the tavern’s entrance, his eyes jumping to it whenever someone came in the door.

Richard turned his gaze back to Zula, not without a certain feeling of pleasure—avuncular, noncreepy—and went on: “Devin just went nuts. His official start date was two weeks before our initial meeting—but by the time he walked in the door, he already had a stack of pages this thick with ideas for historical sagas based on the very sketchy outlines provided by Don Donald. There actually wasn’t much point to the meeting. It was a formality. I just told him to keep it up, and I got an intern cataloging and cross-referencing all his output…”

“The Canon,” Zula said.

“Exactly, that was the beginning of the Canon. Forced us to hire Geraldine. But with the key difference that it was all still fluid, since we hadn’t actually released any of it to the fan base yet. It was kind of scary, the way it grew. Later in the year is when we started to feel a little creeped out by it, like Devin was taking our world and running away with it. So we announced, and I’m not too proud to say that this was a retroactive policy change, that the Writers in Residence program operated on an annual basis and that when Devin’s year was up, he was welcome to continue writing stuff in the T’Rain world but that he would in fact have to share authorship of that world with the next Writer in Residence.”

“Which turned out to be D-squared.”

“No accident. Devin had become so dominant over the world that any other writer just would have been buried under his output. There was only one other writer who had, (a) the prominence in the world of fantasy literature to rival Devin’s, and (b) the priority—”

“He’d been there first,” Zula said.

“Yes. Just long enough to run around and pee on all the trees, but that still counted for a lot.”

“Hey, I just saw someone I know,” Peter announced, nodding toward the entrance. A man in an overcoat had just walked in from the parking lot and was scanning the tavern, trying to decide where he wanted to sit.

“Friend of yours?” Richard asked.

“Acquaintance,” Peter corrected him, “but I should go over and just say hey.”

“Who is it?” Zula asked, looking around, but Peter was already on his feet, headed over to a table by the fire, where the new arrival had just taken a seat. Richard watched as the man looked up at Peter’s face. His expression did not show anything like surprise or recognition. And certainly not pleasure. He had expected to meet Peter here. They had been texting each other about it. Peter was lying.

Richard now sort of forcibly turned the conversation back, because the thing with Peter troubled him and his first instinct with things that troubled him was to wall them off, and then wait for them to grow bad enough to threaten the structural integrity of the wall, and then, finally, to get out a sledgehammer.

“We brought both of them out here,” Richard said.

“To the Schloss?”

“Yeah. It didn’t look like this in those days. It was before the Dwinn mead hall remodel. They came in the summer, when this place has a whole different vibe. We brought some chefs up from Vancouver to prepare meals, and we held a retreat here, sort of to mark the formal handoff from Skeletor to D-squared. That was when the Apostropocalypse happened.”

“ONE IS BEMUSED by the notion of convening a retreat in order to get work done,” said Don Donald, while they were still just milling around on the terrace, sipping pints and getting used to the views of the Selkirks. “Should it not in that case be denominated an advance?”

Richard was lost from the very beginning of that sentence, so gave up altogether on trying to parse it and just watched D-squared’s face. Donald Cameron, then fifty-two, looked older than that, with swept-back silver hair and an impressive honker, swollen from the rich liquid diet of the ancient Cambridge college where he lived about half the time. But his complexion was pink and his manner was vigorous, probably because of all the brisk walks that he took around the castle on the Isle of Man where he lived the other half of the time. He’d checked in to his suite a few hours earlier, rested up for a bit, gone for one of those brisk walks, and stepped out onto the terrace only thirty seconds ago, whereupon he’d been surrounded by about four nerds, sufficiently highly ensconced in Corporation 9592’s food chain that they felt entitled to approach him. Richard knew for a fact that most of these people had stacks of Donald Cameron fantasy novels in their rooms in hopes of getting them signed, and that they were just sucking up to him long enough to feel comfortable with broaching such a request.

“Maybe you need to coin a new word for it,” Richard said, before any of the fanboys could laugh or, worse, try to enter into repartee with the Don.

“Heh. You have noticed my weakness for that sort of thing.”

“We depend on it.”

D-squared raised an eyebrow. “We have already advanced to the point of doing work! One imagined that this was to be a purely social gathering, Mr. Forthrast.” But he was only kidding, as he now indicated by winking, and nodding in the direction of—

Richard turned around and stepped clear of the rapidly growing fan cluster to see Devin Skraelin making his entrance. He wondered whether Devin had been twitching the curtain in his suite, waiting for Don Donald to emerge onto the terrace so that Devin could arrive last. As usual, he was trailed by two “assistants” who seemed too old and authoritative to merit that designation. Richard had been able to establish