hundred-man raids homing in on him.”
“I think that’s actually a good thing,” Egdod said, after thinking about it for a while. Richard had been playing T’Rain for something like fourteen consecutive hours, and his conversational skills weren’t everything that they could be. “I think it gives him more incentive to get it done now. He’s unHidden a million bucks’ worth of gold…”
“One point one million,” Clover corrected him. “He just raked in a big score.”
“Anyway, the point is that for him to re-Hide all of it now, with so many people watching him, would be difficult. Easier to make his strike tonight.”
“So what does that mean for us? Or for you, rather, since I am about as puissant as a bacterium living in Chuck Norris’s bowels.”
“It means that the time has come.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Are you wearing headphones?”
“Yeah.”
“I suggest you take them off.”
“I WAS EXPECTING one Chinese virus-writer kid, alone,” said the man calling himself James, with a nod in Marlon’s direction. “I didn’t realize he’d have a girlfriend, and a Hungarian bodyguard with a pistol in his pocket.”
They had withdrawn to a corner of the Internet cafe where they could speak privately and google things. The place was filling up with mongers.
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Yuxia said. “I don’t think he likes tomboys.”
“De gustibus non est disputandem,” said the man.
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s a fucking idiot.”
Csongor, a bit taken aback to realize that James and Yuxia were flirting with each other, felt himself receding to the periphery of relevance.
“I like him,” Yuxia said, “like a brother. But…” and she held out her hand, fingers splayed, and wiggled it in the air.
“Gotcha,” said James, looking at her fascinatedly. But then he seemed to remember his manners, and his gaze strayed to Csongor. “What’s your story, big guy? Fish out of water, huh?”
While not immune to James’s insouciant charm, Csongor could only think of Zula, so he broke eye contact and looked out the window in a way that must have seemed brooding. He noticed that he was drumming his fingers on the counter, each calloused, sun-dried tip bashing the Formica like a ball-peen hammer.
“I shot him in the head,” he said finally.
He turned to look at James, who had shut up for once. “I. Shot. Him. In. The. Head.”
“Hold on a sec, are you talking about Jones?”
“Yeah. But it was only, what do you call it?” Csongor pantomimed a bullet caroming off the side of his head.
“A graze,” James said. “I fucking
“Yeah. With this.” Csongor slapped the heavy thing in his pocket.
“From how far away?”
“Too close.” And Csongor related the story. This ended up taking a while. He got the impression that this was the longest span of time that “James” had gone without saying anything since he had obtained the power of speech as a toddler.
But before James could follow up on some of the story’s very remarkable features—which was something that he clearly wanted to do in the worst way—they were interrupted by a sharp exclamation from Marlon: “Aiyaa!”
It was the first time since all of this had begun that Marlon had expressed even mild concern about anything. But this was more than that: it was a pang of dismay. He had taken both hands off the keyboard—a completely unprecedented lapse—and clapped them to the sides of his head, and was staring at the screen in astonishment.
His face was illuminated by flickering white light.
“James” was on his feet. He ran around to where he could see the screen. “Holy crap,” he exclaimed. “This could only be one spell. But I don’t think it’s ever been used before.”
“One time,” Marlon said, “it was used to kill a whole dynasty of Titans.”
“Who used it?”
“Egdod.”
“I’m going to Yank you,” said James, running over toward the terminal where his T’Rain session was still open.
“I have wards and spoilers in effect,” Marlon warned him. “You can’t Yank me.”
“Turn them all off and let me do it. My name is Thorakks.”
By now Csongor and Yuxia had edged into the space vacated, moments earlier, by James, and were looking over Marlon’s shoulder. Marlon had pushed all the little chat windows and status displays to the periphery of his screen, so they were seeing the world of T’Rain over the shoulder of Reamde, which was to say that they were now looking over two shoulders, Marlon’s and the Troll’s. The latter was standing on open ground in the floodplain of a river, with the tail end of a mountain range visible on the right, giving way to rolling bottomlands tiled with green fields and speckled with villages. He had, in other words, almost made it out of the Torgai Foothills and seemed to be well on his way to reaching some inhabited place where amenities such as moneychangers and ley line intersections could be found. Csongor, who by now had learned how to make sense of the user interface, observed that Reamde was carrying on his person 9 pieces of Indigold, 767 pieces of Blue Gold, 32,198 pieces of Red Gold, and 198,564 of plain old yellow gold pieces: numbers that boggled the T’Rainian mind, since even a few hundred pieces of yellow gold was rated a considerable fortune and well worth fighting over. This absolutely had to be the largest amount of money ever carried by a single T’Rain character at one time. At a quick calculation it was well over a million dollars in real money, probably closer to two million.
Accordingly, Reamde was surrounded by a phalanx of other characters, too numerous for Csongor to count or even to see. The entire formation was marching across the plain as a bloc, so tightly coordinated in its maneuvers that Csongor reckoned they must all be linked together by some sort of computer algorithm; the other players must have slaved their characters to Reamde’s movements and taken their hands from the controls, allowing Marlon to drive the entire formation.
These things alone—the vast amount of money in play, the colossal size of the formation—would have absorbed the attention of even the most experienced and hard-core T’Rain player. And yet the scene was visually dominated by something even huger and more attention-getting: an incoming comet. At its core it was as bright as the screen of Marlon’s computer was capable of shining, and its brilliance was lighting up all that faced it with ghastly white brilliance while casting everything else into impenetrable shadow. An interesting psychological phenomenon kicked in here, having to do with perception of light and color. They were looking at a monitor screen in a dimly illuminated room. The monitor was a tray of black plastic with some fluorescent tubes in its back and a window covering its front. The window was etched with a few million microscopic light valves, made of liquid crystals, that could be turned on or off, or to various gradations in between. If every single one of those valves was opened up to let 100 percent of the light through, then they would simply be looking at a tray with some fluorescent tubes in the back, and it wouldn’t be all that bright. It would be like staring up at a light fixture in the ceiling of an office: certainly an ample amount of illumination, but nothing compared to the amount of light that the sun shed on the ground, even on the most heavily overcast day. Anyone walking indoors and staring at that tray of light going full blast would not perceive it as bright. They might not even be able to tell whether it was turned on.
And yet Marlon and Csongor and Yuxia were all squinting and averting their gazes and even holding up hands to shield their retinas from the light of the imaginary comet being depicted on the screen of this computer monitor. They perceived it as intolerably bright. Admittedly, this was partly because they were in a dark room and so their pupils were dilated. But beyond that, there was a psychological factor at work. They had been habituated to avert
