The Deadliest Game

tavern and thought absently that, in a way, it was the kind of place his mother had always warned him about. The problem was that, in her more protective moods, she was worried that he might stumble into a place like this in the real world, and he very much doubted that there were any: at least, not where he was likely to run into them, in New York or D.C. Outer Mongolia, possibly, or the Outer Hebrides, or the Yukon maybe. He smiled slightly. It always amused him when someone as tough as his mother, who had danced for years for the New York City Ballet, and therefore had a physique like spring steel and a tongue like a razor, got all worried about her “little boy”—as if he had not inherited any of that toughness himself.

The innkeeper loomed over him suddenly. “You using that other chair?” he said. He was an archetype, just as much as the guy by the fireplace: fat, balding, wearing an apron that had apparently last been washed before the present Dragon cycle began, and in perpetually foul temper.

Leif looked up. “I’m waiting for someone,” he said.

“Great,” the innkeeper said, grabbing the spare chair with one hand. “When he turns up, you can have another chair. I need this for the paying customers.”

Leif picked up the tankard of herbdraft he had been nursing and waved it meaningfully at the innkeeper.

“Tough,” the innkeeper said. “You want another chair, you pay for another drink.” He started to laugh at his own alleged wit, exhibiting teeth like something from a dentist’s horror novel.

“It is unwise,” Leif said, “to insult a wizard.”

The innkeeper looked him over with a sneer, plainly unimpressed by what he saw — a slender young man in a somewhat ragged robe decorated with faded and obscure alchemical and magical symbols. “You’re nothing but a hedgie,” the innkeeper scoffed. “What’re you going to do? Not leave a tip?”

“No,” Leif said mildly, “I’ll give you a tip.” He pulled off his hat, fumbled around in it for a moment, and then came up with what he had been looking for. He threw it at the innkeeper, and said one word under his breath.

The innkeeper caught it by reflex — stared, for a moment, at what looked like a piece of rag tied up with string — and then got a startled expression. From nowhere, a puff of smoke appeared and wrapped itself around him. All around the inn, heads turned.

The smoke slowly cleared. Where the innkeeper had been standing, there was now a small white mouse sitting on the floor, looking around it in shock.

Leif leaned down and picked up the wrapped-up talisman from beside it. “Even hedge-wizards,” he said, “know some spells. That a good enough tip?” And he glanced under the next table before looking back at the mouse. “Have a nice day.”

The mouse turned to see what had caught Leif’s attention…and saw the beat-up white cat walking toward him with an expression that suggested it was ready for a predinner snack.

The mouse ran off across the cracked and worn flagstones of the floor, with the cat heading after it, not really hurrying, just enjoying the prospect of its hors d’oeuvre.

The other patrons of the inn turned away, not too concerned about this, since the innkeeper’s daughter, totally unconcerned, had begun making the rounds and taking drink orders. Leif tucked his talisman away and sat back with his drink again, his attention distracted once more by the sound of the foreign merchants discussing the futures markets.

Here as in the real world, there was a hot trade among the merchants in hog-belly futures, and Leif had no trouble imagining his father sitting right here with these guys and talking margins and short-sells until the cows, or the hogs, came home.

I really should try to get him in here sometime, Leif thought idly. We might be able to make some “money.” His father’s talent with investments, though, kept him hopping all over the planet, physically as well as virtually: so much so that he pretty much refused to spend his scarce leisure time anywhere virtual, or doing anything that sounded even slightly like “talking shop.” If I could get him in here, he’d probably much rather be some kind of berserk warrior in a loincloth. Anything to get out of a suit….

Leif’s attention was momentarily attracted by another of the patrons across the room, a tall, lean, intent young man in a dark jerkin who was methodically checking and clearing a gun, some kind of semiautomatic with a Glock in its ancestry. Normally one might have expected this to cause some stir, but the Pheasant and Firkin was located in the little princedom of Elendra, and Elendra was one of the places in Sarxos where gunpowder didn’t work. It didn’t work in most places in Sarxos, actually. The creator of the game had been making his alternate world mostly for those who preferred strictly mechanical weapons, preferably the kind that meant you and your enemy had to get up close and personal to kill one another.

But Chris Rodrigues had also apparently suspected that there would always be those for whom life would not be complete without weapons that went BANG, the more frequently and the more loudly the better, and for them, Sarxos had the adjacent countries of Arstan and Lidios, where explosives and other chemical-based weaponry were enabled. They were noisy places, featuring frequent wars with high body counts. Many Sarxonians made it a point to avoid Arstan and Lidios entirely, reasoning that it was better to let the boys and girls who were inclined that way just get on with what made them happy, and not distract or upset them with annoying visions of a world where people did business differently.

Apparently these visions did bother some players a little, for there were frequent attempts to find some explosive or gunpowder-analogue that would work in the rest of Sarxos as well, despite the game creator’s insistence that there was no such substance, nor would there be. Some players — aspiring alchemists, or would-be weapons dealers — would occasionally spend prolonged periods trying to invent such a substance. They tended to have accidents that were hard to explain except by an old Sarxonian saying: “The Rules take care of themselves.”

The black cast-iron handle of the door near Leif turned. The door creaked open, swinging toward him and hiding his view. The patrons stopped what they were doing and stared — they would always do that, even if the person coming in was someone they knew. But it plainly wasn’t, this time. They kept on staring.

The person who had come in now turned and shut the door. Medium height, slim build, long brown hair tied back tight and braided up around her head: dark clothes, all somber colors — brown tunic, black breeches and boots, a tight dark-brown leather jerkin over it all, dark-brown leather bands cross-binding the breeches, a dark brown robe over it all, divided up the back for riding, and a brown leather pack. If she was armed, Leif couldn’t see where…not that that meant anything.

She looked around long enough to complete her part of the staring game — for it was a game. You had to meet the crowd’s eyes, let them know that you had as much right to be here as they did…otherwise there would be trouble, trouble that you might or might not start, but would definitely finish. The patrons of the Pheasant and Firkin, perceiving this, became elaborately uninterested in the new arrival.

She looked over at Leif. He lifted his hat again, enough to let her see the red hair.

She smiled and came over, sat down in the other chair, and looked around her with a wry expression.

“You come here often?” she said.

Leif rolled his eyes at the tired old line.

“No, I mean it seriously. This place is an utter dive. How’d you find it?”

Leif chuckled. “I stumbled in last year, during the wars. It has a certain rural charm, don’t you think?”

“It has mice,” Megan said, pulling her feet back a little and looking under the table at something that ran by. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, here comes the cat….”

Leif chuckled. “You want something to drink? The tea’s not bad.”

“In a while. I take it you got the list from Winters.”

“Yup…a few days ago.” Leif pushed the tea-tankard away from him and sat looking thoughtful. “Parts of it surprised me. Problem is, if I knew those people at all, I knew most of them by their game-names and not by real- world names — otherwise maybe I would have caught on sooner. Probably a lot of people would have. But what’s plain right away is that all the people ‘bounced’ were very active players. No dillies.” Leif used the Sarxos term for “dilettantes,” people who played the Game less often than once a week. “And as far as I can tell, no ‘minor’ characters. All the people who got bounced were movers and shakers of one kind or another.”

Megan nodded. She apparently had noticed this, too. But she looked at him a little cockeyed. “A few days ago? I would have thought you’d want to get started looking around here right away.”

“Oh, I did.” Leif grinned at her. “But I wanted to do the first few pieces of groundwork on my own. If it turned