their gaze from extremely bright objects that did what the light in this fictional scene was doing, that is, shining out of the sky and casting deep shadows on the ground, and these instincts were kicking in as the comet drew closer. Moreover, the subwoofer attached to Marlon’s computer had gone into some kind of serious overdrive and was causing visible nervousness among the porn-watching clientele of the cafe, who had probably been warned that there were lots of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis in the Philippines. One of them even jumped up from his monitor and made a run for the door, fearing he might in the next moment be buried in a lahar. Csongor, snapping out of suspended-disbelief mode, stepped forward and twiddled a knob on the speaker, cutting the bass to a more manageable level.
This made it possible to hear James, who was hollering from across the cafe: “Dude. It is Comet Rider. And it is targeted on your ass. You are going to die. Let me Yank you.”
Marlon’s hands flickered like firelight over the keyboard, changing some of the interface settings. Csongor was familiar with what he was doing, since he’d been forced to learn similar tricks in order to perceive all the warding spells that were permanently installed around the trading pit at the Carthinias Exchange. These suddenly became visible—though badly washed out by comet-light—around Reamde and his phalanx: at least a dozen concentric layers of colored force fields, some dome shaped, some conical, some open-topped cylinders, all depicted in different hues and shimmering with various textures. Spells for turning aside projectile weapons, for stopping magical fireballs, for making hidden characters visible, and for inflicting damage automatically on any foes who tried to penetrate to the center.
And for preventing the beneficiary from being Yanked. Yanking was a spell, normally used with hostile intent, that abducted the target character and sucked him across space at unthinkable velocity and deposited him at the feet of the spell caster.
Marlon began bringing down the curtains of protective spells. In doing so, he was exposing himself and the members of his army to attack; but his army was dissolving anyway, fleeing on a menagerie of winged, four-footed, and six-footed mounts, magic carpets, numinous motorcycles, and magical currents of air, trying to put as much space as possible between themselves and him upon whom the comet was unmistakably crosshaired.
Just as the screen was going completely white and the subwoofer trying to turn itself inside out, a translucent image of Thorakks appeared square in the middle, reaching toward him with one gloved and mailed fist. The screen became considerably darker, and they were treated to an animation that made it seem as though they were being vomited up an esophagus of eerily colored smoke and twining tendrils.
And then they were on a rocky ledge on the side of a mountain somewhere, looking at Thorakks, who was lit up a blinding white on one side and completely black on the other.
Marlon spun the point of view around so that they were looking in the same direction as Thorakks, that is, into the valley below them. A fireball the size of Staten Island was just that second slamming into the ground. Marlon had to turn the subwoofer totally off.
They stood there for a minute or so just to enjoy the spectacle: a shock wave spreading out from the middle like a ripple in a pond, eventually freezing to create the rim of a crater. Columns of steam rising up from the vaporized river. Rocks and trees raining down (both Thorakks and Reamde cast warding spells to keep from getting crushed by falling debris). The vast bubble of light and smoke gradually focusing into a column, the column resolving into a bipedal figure: a man with a long white beard, gazing about the crater somewhat in the manner of someone who has just turned on the light in his pantry and is looking for cockroaches. For—as Csongor now understood—this being had literally rode in on the comet, like a child descending a hill on a trash can lid.
“Egdod,” Marlon said in an interesting combination of reverence, disbelief, and pants-pissing fear.
“Never thought I’d see him in-game,” said James indistinctly from across the room. A moment later the words were repeated, in a harsh metallic voice, and with a different accent, by Thorakks.
Marlon was busy invoking new spells, trying to rebuild the defenses he had shut down in order to allow himself to be Yanked and trying, Csongor suspected, to make himself invisible. Noting this, Thorakks said, with mild amusement: “Seriously? You’re going to put up a fight?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to go on the lam from Egdod.”
“I have no choice.”
“Do you know who his player is?”
“Of course I know.”
“Do you know he’s the uncle of your friend Zula?”
Marlon froze for a moment, and Csongor imagined that, in Marlon’s mind’s eye, he was seeing the image he had described to them during the voyage: a moment, just after Ivanov had been shot and Csongor knocked out, when Zula’s face had met Marlon’s through a dirty windowpane, and their eyes had connected for a few moments.
Then his eyes refocused on the screen.
“I will talk to the uncle of Zula when I have the money,” Marlon said, “and have given it to my friends. Their home has been exploded and they are running from the police and from everyone else, and they are depending on me to finish this.”
“Then let’s haul ass,” James suggested.
Marlon poised his fingers on the keyboard, then glanced up at Csongor. “Are you ready?”
“I will be,” Csongor said, “by the time you get there.”
“HEY, BIGFOOT,” CORVALLIS said. “You are rearranging the planet faster than our servers can update the caches.”
“It’s good for you,” Richard muttered. “Call it a stress test and get on with it.”
“It doesn’t help that you’re doing it at one in the morning when most of our senior staff are asleep.”
“It’s Saturday. They’re partying. What do you think phones are for?”
“I’ll try to reach them but—”
“Before you do that, tell me where the little fucker is.”
“So he’s back to being a little fucker now?”
“There are a lot of crushed and incinerated remains underfoot… but he should have survived… I cast a protective ward on him immediately before impact.”
After a lot of typing, C-plus answered: “He’s not there. He got Yanked just in time by one Thorakks. I can give you general coordinates, but they are moving fast and the database is going to lag.”
“Just give me a place to start tracking them,” said Richard, sounding more and more like Egdod himself with every moment. “No, scratch that.”
“Come again?”
“They have to be heading for an LLI,” Richard said, using the ingame jargon for ley line intersection. “There’s only one place they can move this amount of gold.”
AS LONG AS Zula kept herself busy cleaning up the aftermath of dinner, she was able to avoid thinking about keys and padlocks. They had eaten the food from disposable plastic plates, which she collected and stacked, scraping any residue into a garbage bag. She placed the stack of scraped plates into a second garbage bag. The cooking pots she washed using water that she heated up on the camp stove. She left those out to dry. The chain, naturally, confined her to a circular area, and she’d already made up her mind that she would sleep as far away as possible from where she put the garbage, in case it drew vermin or worse. For now, she placed the garbage bags —which were not yet very bulky—into a cooler, just to keep them safe from small critters such as mice. She considered explaining to the men that they should hang their food from tree limbs, then thought better of it. Instead she dragged the cooler as far as she could go in the direction of the tents where the men were sleeping and left it there. Let them deal with the local wildlife. At worst it would give her some entertainment; at best it might cover her escape. Moving as far as she could go in the opposite direction, 180 degrees around the circle from the food dump, she began to arrange her own little campsite. This consisted of a tiny one-person camp shelter, just large enough to house a sleeping bag.
They hadn’t said anything about toilet facilities. As far as she could make out, they were just wandering off into the woods when they needed to eliminate. Does a terrorist shit in the woods? Apparently. But Zula did not have that option. They had equipped her with a large steel serving spoon. She went to a place at the end of her
