border, Ershut or Jahandar would cut her throat—not, she guessed, before she’d cooked them a meal and done the dishes—and then they would set out in pursuit of the main body. And knowing the two of them, they’d have little difficulty in catching up. Zakir and Sayed, she guessed, would be left behind to throw dirt on her corpse.
The meal broke up, and the men scattered into the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight, leaving her with a pile of dirty paper plates and some pots that needed scrubbing. Most of them went to bed. Jahandar made himself tea with the water she had been heating for dishes, then retreated to a position a short distance up the hill, whence he could survey the whole camp and all below it. He took his rifle with him.
Zula did the dishes. Imagining Jahandar’s crosshairs on her forehead.
SEVERAL HOURS OF despair had given way to the vague notion, more in Csongor’s heart than his head, that he was beginning to make sense of the Carthinias Exchange and its diverse actors. There was a trading pit in the middle of the place, a full 360-degree amphitheater of polished stone steps, perhaps thirty meters—the limit of shouting distance—at its top, funneling in and down to a tiny, flat floor no more than three meters across. The thing was split neatly in half through the middle, though there were no screens or fences or visual cues to make this obvious; it could be inferred by noticing that different sorts of people tended to congregate on each side: on the one, merchants who were trying to get money out of the world, and on the other, priests from the temples, trying to make full use of their money-annihilating capacity by undercutting the competing priests.
So much for the side-to-side split. Csongor sensed that there was some kind of top-to-bottom stratification as well, and he was developing a theory that the people down toward the bottom were trading in larger blocs of money, while the upper levels were for small-timers. To outward appearances, none of these merchants was carrying much gold into the pit and none of the priests was carrying much out of it. Accordingly, he had guessed at first that they were only trading in paper and that the actual transfer of specie was happening in a bank or warehouse somewhere. But then he noticed small, sparkly objects trading hands, generally making their way from the small-timers at the top down toward the heavy hitters in the lower pit. Some wiki searching told him that T’Rain had several types of metal even more precious than gold, though the vast majority of characters in the world never even laid eyes on the stuff; it was used only to effect colossal transactions. One sort of coin—Red Gold—was worth a hundred gold pieces. A Blue Gold piece was worth a hundred of those, and Indigo Gold, or Indigold for short, worth a hundred of
It seemed of the highest importance to T’Rain’s art directors that these coins look as flashy as their high value implied, and so they gleamed, sending out flashes of colored light as they were passed from hand to hand. Plain old yellow stuff was changing hands in the plaza around the amphitheater, frequently being bulk converted, by strolling moneychangers, into Red Gold coins that were making their way over the rim of the pit and transacting lively commerce in its upper reaches, making a flashing red constellation, as if LEDs were blinking all over the place. But farther down, the predominant color was Blue; and at the bottom it deepened to Indigo.
The transaction that Marlon hoped to pull off would amount to something like thirty pieces of Indigold, or three thousand of the Blue stuff. Since carrying around three thousand pieces of anything was not practical, Csongor had little choice but to set up a relationship with one of the big traders down in the bottom of the pit who, (a) dealt in Indigold all the time, and (b) was controlled by players who could wire funds to the Philippines. But precisely because such characters were carrying around such immense amounts of money, security here was suffocating, with the innermost and lowest ring of the amphitheater guarded by a ring of extremely fearsome-looking guards, standing shoulder to shoulder and looking outward, and walled, roofed, and domed by nested layers of shimmering light that Csongor recognized, vaguely, as magical spells. In T’Rain, figuring out how powerful another character was was a far more complicated proposition than in other such games where you could merely compare levels. Csongor lacked the experience to judge another character’s abilities, but he knew a few rules of thumb and had little doubt that even the small-time traders around the rim could strike Lottery Discountz dead just by giving him a cross look.
Which gave him the notion that he might be able to get close to the center of the action precisely because he was so harmless. He tried the experiment of simply walking across the plaza to the edge of the pit and then clambering down on to the topmost bench. No one cared. He moved down another. No reaction. Things began to get crowded and he had to sidestep this way and that to find gaps in the crowd of traders, but no one paid him any particular note. He was close to the dividing line between the merchant side and the priestly side, and he heard priests calling out “Benison!” and coming together with merchants to exchange money. Benisons, as he’d learned, were a way for players to transfer real money
And this gave Csongor all he needed to form a sort of plan. He worked his way down as close as he could to the ring of guards, the dome of spells. Once he descended to the point where the magic barriers were inflicting damage on Lottery Discountz and the guards were turning their eyes his direction and reaching for their weapons, he backed off a step, sat down, and began to observe the transactions taking place in the innermost circle. Flashes of purple were going off all over the place. He was watching millions of dollars changing hands. The total number of traders within that ring was perhaps twenty, and any one of them could handle the transaction he had in mind.
He was beginning to hear words coming from Marlon’s mouth, which pulled him out of the imaginary world and brought him back into the Internet cafe in the Philippines. Marlon, who had played almost silently for the last couple of hours, was now communicating directly, in Mandarin, with one of his lieutenants. Or perhaps they were generals. Csongor could only speculate at the size of his army now. Marlon’s voice was calm, quiet, but insistent, and his hands were prancing around the keyboard like spiders on a hot skillet.
Since Lottery Discountz was doing nothing except observing the trade pit, Csongor rose, stretched, and strolled over to have a look. Yuxia too seemed to have been stirred awake by the sound of someone speaking in Mandarin and opened her eyes slightly, then stiffened, remembering where she was. Her eyes fixed and focused on something across the room. Csongor followed her gaze and saw that the morning shift, if that was the right word for it, was filtering into the cafe. For the last few hours they’d had the whole place almost to themselves, but there were a couple of new arrivals who had ensconced themselves behind terminals in Yuxia’s line of sight. One of them was just in the act of glancing away. Csongor, hardly a stranger to girl-watching, reckoned Yuxia must have caught him looking and was now giving him the evil eye. Not wanting to get caught up in that exchange, Csongor got to where he could look over Marlon’s shoulder and view his monitor.
The last half-dozen times Csongor had checked, he had seen nothing on Marlon’s screen that looked remotely like a virtual sword and sorcery world. Instead it had been countless overlapping panes containing ramified orc charts, bar graphs, fluctuating statistical displays, and scrolling columns of chat. All that was gone now, replaced by something that looked a little more like it: a melee at the throat of a narrow pass between foothills. Several members of Marlon’s army—not the main group, but one of his flank guards—had been attacked as they forded a stream that ran through the pass. It looked like a carefully laid ambush, and half a dozen of them were already lying dead in the shallows. But reinforcements were hurtling into the combat zone on land, in the air, and over the water, engaging the ambushers in many single combats that merged and divided as one fighter came to the aid of another, then wheeled about to contend with some new threat.
“Problems?” Csongor asked.
“No,” Marlon said, “we will kick their asses.”
“Are you going to do any ass kicking?” Csongor asked. Because he had noticed that Reamde was just biding his time on a boulder in the middle of the stream.
“Not needed,” Marlon said. “I am observing.”
“What do you see?”
Marlon took a long time to answer. Then he spoke as if these observations were just coming into his
