The Deadliest Game

and folktales, and fantasy stories of any age, from the present time straight back to Lucian of Samosata, for familiar and unfamiliar themes. As a result, it was usually a good idea to treat strangers considerately when you met them in the woods. They might be players in disguise…or they might be the game’s creator, interested in seeing if you were playing in the spirit he had intended.

“Well, rewarded, yeah, but she just gave me a discount. She didn’t give me the thing for free,” Leif said.

“All the same, sounds like you got a bargain.”

“I did. It’s as good a cover for me to go to Minsar as anything would be,” Leif said. “There are probably a fair number of wounded who haven’t been attended to yet, not by magic-workers anyway. What’s your excuse?”

“Same as usual,” Megan said. “Freelance trouble-maker-warrior, thief, or spy, as necessary, and according to who’ll pay me. I wander around, see who’s doing what to whom, and sell the information to whoever’s willing to pay the most. Do the occasional theft…in a good cause, of course. Fight, if it comes to that. Even here, where people should know better, they don’t always suspect soon enough that a girl or woman may be as good a fighter as they are, or better.” She smiled, a slightly grim look. “They suspect it even less when you don’t look like a giant shieldmaiden with a brass bra and a big spear. That suits me fine. I don’t mind exploiting archetypes…even if I’m only doing it negatively.”

Leif nodded, thinking. “It’s a good persona,” he said. “Spies have a good reason to be anywhere…even when they don’t, really. And they raise the level of paranoia around them just by being there. People let things slip that they might not have let slip otherwise.”

“Yup.” Megan drank more tea, then paused for a moment to look down into her tankard. “What the…There’s something in this.”

“What? Extra herbs?”

“Herbs don’t have this many legs. Just a bug,” Megan said, pausing for a moment to fish it out, examining it for a moment with a critical eye, and then tossing it over her shoulder. “Okay. So you’ve got plenty of miles. We’ll go after we finish here, then, if you’re ready.”

“Yup. I need a few moments to make sure of the coordinates before we go, that’s all. Don’t want to wind up in Wussonia by mistake.”

Megan looked at him with a bemused expression. “Wussonia? I don’t recognize the name.”

Leif grimaced. “It’s right over the other side of the Bay of Twilight,” he said. “Little place. Isolated. With good reason.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t look so interested! You wouldn’t want to go there.” Leif shuddered slightly. “The place is, well, it’s on the soft side. Full of homesick princesses disguised as bards wandering around on quests for the Magic Whatsit, and wise telepathic unicorns with big eyes full of some ancient sorrow, and little tiny dwarves with pointy hats that ride around on friendly forest animals. Miniature bears and badgers living in little houses built into the trunks of trees. Tiny fluttery fairies with gauzy wings.”

Megan made a face. “Sounds like it would be bad for your blood sugar.”

“Or your sanity. It’s not all that far from Minsar, that’s the problem. Misplace a decimal point in the transit spell, and we could wind up there. Or worse, in Arstan or Lidios.” He glanced again over at the guy who was, for the third or maybe the fourth time, cleaning his Glock-clone.

“No, thanks,” Megan said, “there are enough guns where I live already.”

Leif nodded and sat back, stretching his legs out. “Even if we’re not already on the right track, which I doubt,” he said, “we should be able to find out something useful up in Minsar, if as you say the big players are converging on the place. The gossip always runs hottest after a battle…especially a battle where one of the protagonists got bounced.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Megan said. “If we can just — What is it?” she said curiously, for Leif was suddenly looking under the next table again.

“Uh-oh,” Leif said. “Well, I guess this has gone far enough. Esmiratovelithoth! ”

There was a BANG! of displaced air from under the table. Heads snapped up all around the room, most noticeably that of the guy cleaning the almost-Glock. Everyone stared.

From beneath the table, somewhat grimy and swearing, the inn’s landlord crawled. His face and arms were badly scratched; the marks looked like cat scratches, but seemed much deeper and wider than they should have. Muttering, but pointedly not looking at Leif, the landlord got to his feet, brushed himself off, and headed for the kitchen, swearing with constantly increasing fluency as he went.

The dark-cloaked boy in the chimney corner was laughing, more at the guy with the Glock than at the innkeeper. Megan looked after the latter with interest. “He was that mouse?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Doesn’t that violate the square-cube law or something? I mean, what did he do with all that mass while he was mouse-sized?”

“Hey,” Leif said, “it’s magic, which means the software handles the sordid details. Don’t ask me about software design…it’s not my specialty.”

They got up. Megan tossed a coin ringing to the table. The innkeeper’s daughter swooped on it, bit it in the approved fashion, and stowed it away in her bodice. “This one’s on me,” Megan said as the girl went away. “Under the circumstances, you might get in trouble if you tried to pay. Guy might think you were putting a curse on him.”

“Now I would never do a thing like that.”

“Tell him,” Megan said, glancing back at the glaring, swearing innkeeper.

They made their way out.

Megan was just as glad to be leaving, as a fight had begun brewing between the Glock guy and the dark- cloaked man sitting close to the fireplace. “You lookin’ at me?” the Glock guy was demanding. “Nobody else here to look at. You lookin’ at me?”

“Gonna be lively in there in a few minutes,” she said as she and Leif headed toward the big square of grass that was the “village green” in front of the Pheasant and Firkin.

“Better to get away now then,” Leif said. “More interesting stuff’s going on in Minsar anyway. By the way, when we get there, do we ‘know each other’?”

Megan thought about that as they made their way through the evening dark to an empty patch of grass across from the tavern. Here and there, in the grass, sheep were grazing, and they had left in the grass the kind of thing sheep frequently leave behind them, so that Megan watched where she put her feet. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t. There are enough chance meetings in Sarxos that no one’s likely to suspect anything in particular. And neither of us is high-profile enough to attract any attention by being in the other’s company.”

“Right,” Leif said. “Okay, we can make the transit from here.”

“Not there,” Megan said, pointing at the ground. “Unless you want to bring that big lump of sheep by-product with us.”

“Oh.” Leif moved over a few feet. “Right.”

“How big is the transit locus?” Megan said.

“Five feet. Ready? Here we go.”

Megan looked around her to make sure nothing she needed was outside the five-foot locus. Nothing was. Her weapons were all very closely fastened to her person, the ones that weren’t already part of her.

Leif said a sixteen-syllable word.

The world went black, then white, then dark again, and Megan’s ears popped hard. Then a few seconds later, they popped again, while she was still trying to rub the dancing phosphene-dots out of her eyes. The problem with these transit spells was that they briefly did the virtual-reality equivalent of popping you into and out of hyperspace, and left you disoriented and half blind for some seconds, as if someone had blown off a flashbulb in your face.

Megan blinked. Her vision was returning fast. They were standing in the profound stillness of a thick dark pine forest, of the kind that appeared in entirely too many fairy tales, and night was coming on fast. The city of Minsar was nowhere to be seen.

“You missed,” she said, trying hard not to sound too accusatory.

“Merde,” Leif muttered, “bloody damn du tonnere, how’d that happen?”