The Deadliest Game

out to be a waste of time, well, it was my time, not both of ours.”

“Oh. Okay. So where’d you go for your groundwork?”

“Up north, mostly.” Sarxos had two main continents, one north, one south. From the northerly one a great archipelago reached down in “the Crescent” toward the southern, making thousands of suitable havens for pirates, rebels, and those who wanted to take a few weeks off from the business of gaming to work on their virtual tans. “I was talking with a few people,” Leif said. “One of them was a guy whose game-name was Lindau.”

“Lindau as in the storming of the Inner Harbor?” said Megan.

“Yup. Not that he’s been storming much of anything since he was bounced. Also I had a chat with Erengis, who was Lindau’s archenemy for so long. She’s a regular gossip shop on two legs.” Leif stretched, glancing under the nearby table. “And I talked to a few other people who were enemies of Shel’s, or some of the other bounced people; and some of their friends.”

He must have looked a little smug, to judge by the expression on Megan’s face. “Right,” she said. “And did one particular name come up at all? Several times, in fact?”

Leif smiled slightly. “You’re there before me.”

“Argath,” said Megan.

Leif nodded.

Argath was the king of Orxen, one of the more northerly countries, a place mountainous and short on resources, except for large numbers of barbarians clad in beast-skins — people who loved to go to war at a moment’s notice. The place had earned itself the cognomen “The Black Kingdom” because of a tendency over many game-years to side with the Dark Lord during his periodic risings. Yet somehow it never itself got overrun, a cause of considerable annoyance and envy to some other players.

Argath had insinuated himself into the kingship of Orxen over the last game-decade by means that were considered normal in Sarxos. He had made a name for himself as an effective general of the Orxenian forces during the period of rule of a weak and ineffective king. No one was terribly surprised when elderly King Laurin apparently had an accident near his fishpond late one night, and was found in the morning head down among the bemused koi by his body-servants, several hours drowned. No one was surprised when the murder failed to be pinned on anyone specific; and no one was surprised when Argath was elected king by acclamation, the unfortunate King Laurin having outlived all his heirs.

Argath’s career after that had been unremarkable, by Sarxonian standards. He campaigned in the summer, like most people did, and intrigued during the winter, setting up agreements with other players, or weaseling out of them. He won battles, and lost them, but mostly he won: Argath was good at what he did. Shel had fought him a game-year or so previously, in the same kind of skirmish that Shel had had with Delmond, and Shel had won, which had surprised some of the locals. Argath’s army had been much bigger than Shel’s.

“And Argath,” Megan said, “is not a construct — not an artifact or built-in feature of the game.”

“No, he’s ‘live,’ I know,” Leif said. “Someone told me once what he does in real life. It sure looks kind of like Argath might have it in for anybody who had beat him in a fair fight.”

“But only recently,” Megan said. “All these bounces are within the last three years of game-time. Why would he just start going after people all of a sudden?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Leif shrugged. “Something happens at home. Something snaps. All of a sudden he starts playing rough.”

“Well, maybe, but we don’t have any evidence to support that idea,” Megan said, “and Sherlock Holmes says it’s a bad move to hypothesize without enough data. Anyway, all we’ve got so far is circumstantial evidence.”

“We’ve gotta start somewhere, though,” Leif said. “Argath’ll do, unless you can think of somewhere better.”

“I don’t know if it’s better,” Megan said. “I had been thinking of going up to Minsar.”

“Where the last bounce happened.”

“Not so much because of the location itself. But that’s where, as they say, ‘the eagles are gathered together.’ An army, even a little one, doesn’t have its commander go missing-and-presumed-bounced without attracting a lot of attention, and that’s where they’ll be based until the situation sorts itself out…until they find a new lord to swear allegiance to, or decide to disband. We could find out a lot while everyone’s descending on the place to do the sorting.”

“Sounds like a good bet. But I still think we should look into Argath.”

Megan made an “oh-why-not” face. “So exactly where is the big A at the moment?”

“Take a guess.”

“Minsar?” Megan looked bemused. “You’re kidding. What would he be doing there? Minsar’s much too downmarket for him. One free city isn’t going to keep his interest. Argath campaigns for whole countries. Look what he did over in Sarvent, and up north in Proveis! The city isn’t at a spot of any great strategic value either. The river’s not even navigable up that far.”

“No one’s really sure what he’s doing there,” Leif said. “Maybe the motive’s just revenge. After all, Shel did beat him once. There’s a power vacuum. Maybe now he thinks he can move in and take over.”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Argath’s been a pretty subtle operator in the past. Why would he do something so obvious?”

“Carelessness,” Leif said. “Certainty that he wouldn’t get caught.”

“Well…maybe. But, look, it’s like you say, we have to start somewhere….” Megan looked around. “Who do we order a drink from in here?”

“The innkeeper’s daughter. Her dad’s busy.”

Maybe it was Leif’s slight smile that made Megan give him a brief sharp look. Leif sat there looking innocent until the innkeeper’s daughter came by. Megan ordered tea. When it came, she spent a few moments sipping it and looking thoughtful, while Leif turned his attention to watching something that was going on in the darkness under a table off to their right. “So,” she said. “How’ll we get there? Walk? Or have you got horses outside?”

“Huh?” Leif looked up, briefly shocked. “Uh, no. I fall off horses.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t tell me. You ride.”

Megan made a wry face. “Actually, it’s not what I’m best at. I wouldn’t mind just long-marching it, except that Minsar’s some way from here, and I hate wasting the time.”

“Lucky for you you’re traveling with a wizard, then,” Leif said. “I have about three thousand miles saved up.”

He appreciated the quick relieved grin Megan flashed him. If you didn’t have a horse to help you get around Sarxos, or some other means of transport, like a litter-bearing team, or a tame basilisk to ride, you usually wound up walking…and it could seem to take forever: part of the designer’s plan to have you “really experience” his world. But players who chose to could take the points they accrued in play, not as money or power, but as transit: the ability to (with the use of the proper rapid-transit spell, one so simple even nonwizards could manage it) simply disappear from one spot and appear in another. Armies could not use this facility: Rodrigues had been quoted as saying that that would be “too damn much like real life.” But people traveling peaceably in company could use it to go wherever they liked.

“That’s a lot of miles,” Megan said. “What have you been doing in here to earn all that?”

“The usual hedge-wizard stuff,” Leif said. “Healing the sick…raising the dead.”

Megan raised an eyebrow. Few wizards in Sarxos were quite that powerful. “Well, healing the sick anyway,” Leif said, with a slight smile. “When I first got into the game, I bought a healing-stone from a wise-woman who was retiring. It’s a pretty good one, good against everything up to about level-five wounds and level-six disease.”

Megan blinked, apparently impressed. “Level five? Anything that can grow back a chopped-off arm or leg must make you pretty popular on the battlefield. How the frack did you afford something like that?”

Leif laughed softly. “Well, I shouldn’t have been able to really. But the lady was nice about it. I met her in the forest and she asked me for a drink of water, and I gave it to her—”

“Oh,” Megan said, “one of those old ladies. You did her a Good Deed, and she Rewarded you.” There was a lot of this kind of thing in Sarxos: Rodridgues was not above pillaging old fairy tales,