The Deadliest Game

faces at me. You should see yourself.”

She looked at him dubiously. It went right against her grain to ignore Winters’s “suggestion.” She understood his concern. She knew what her parents would say if she told them anything about this. But whether she planned to tell them anything about this, right this minute anyway, was another story. Maybe later. But right now — I have to make a choice.

“Well—” she said.

“And look,” Leif said. “We’ve still got problems. Argath, or whoever, is still out there, and I bet he, she, they, or it—”

“He, for my money,” Megan said.

“Yeah — anyway, they’re still targeting people. What about those other two lords that Elblai was mentioning? Fettick and Morn? To judge by what she was saying last night, they’re likely to be the next targets. I mean, look at it, Megan! Whoever’s doing this, they’re not waiting around to hit someone who’s beaten Argath anymore. Whether it is Argath himself, or someone using some kind of weird cover—”

“What I still don’t get is why anyone would do that.”

“A grudge,” Leif said. “Or the attacker is crazy. Never mind…there’s still time to work that out. But whatever the cause, whoever it is that’s doing this, they’ve stopped being patient about it. They’re hitting people before they actually fight Argath, when it just looks like there’s a possibility they might beat him.”

“Yeah. All right. I see your point. So — what’ll we do? Go try to warn them? Which kingdoms were in question?”

“Errint and Aedleia,” she said. “I know them slightly: they’re northern neighbors of Orxen. I’ve got more than enough transit to get us there. We can be there tonight. Their battles weren’t scheduled to happen right away. It’s just possible that we can—”

“What? Get them not to go ahead with a campaign that they’ve been planning, and that they really want? That’s gonna be a good trick.”

“We’ve got to try. We didn’t try hard enough last night…and look what happened. You want to see these new targets run off a road…or worse? And what about all the others who might shortly be in the same situation? There have to be other players who’ve been waiting their chance to take Argath on. After these guys, they’ll be a threat, too. If we can find out what other players are eager to fight him, we may be able to find some other connecting strand, some line of data that’ll lead us to whoever’s doing this. And I want them,” Leif said softly. “I want them.”

Megan nodded slowly. She did not often feel physically violent. Even when she managed to engineer situations that gave her an excuse, every now and then, to toss her brothers around, it was mostly enjoyment she felt, and amused satisfaction at the looks on their faces as she reminded them that life was not always predictable. But now…now she felt, uncharacteristically, like she wanted to hurt somebody. Specifically, whoever had sent Elblai into the hospital, pale, with an oxygen mask hiding her pretty, motherly face.

“Look,” Leif said. “Do your briefing for Winters. Get that finished, leave it on timed-send in your computer, and get it off to him tonight…after we’re already in Sarxos. Or after we’ve come out.”

“Leif, I can’t tonight,” Megan said. “I told you, I have this family thing—”

“This is an emergency,” Leif said. “Isn’t it? Can’t you beg off just this once?”

She thought about that, thought about the concerned look on her father’s face. “Probably,” she said. “I don’t usually do this.”

“Come on, Megan. It’s important. And it’s more than just those other people.” He looked at her, intense. “What are you really thinking about doing after you get out of school?”

“Well, strategic operations, obviously, but—”

“But where? For some think tank? Doing it in some dry boring place where you’ll never actually get out to see whether what you’ve planned is happening? You want to do it in Net Force, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Megan said. “Of course I do. It’s…I think it’s one of the most important agencies we’ve got now, though there are probably people who would say that’s overrating it.” She shifted a little uncomfortably. “It’s the cutting edge.”

“Well, you want to stay there, don’t you? If you back off from this now, just because Winters told you to get out of danger, out of trouble…If we succeed in making it into Net Force someday, there’s going to be danger and trouble. This is just practice. Besides — they’re watching us. You know they’re watching us. If we go in alongside them — maybe even ahead of them — and crack this thing, with our eyes open and our brains hot, you think they’re going to be angry about that? I don’t think so. They’re going to be impressed. If we impress them now—”

Megan nodded. “I can’t believe,” she said slowly, “that we’re not at least as good as any operatives they’re going to send in there. Besides, we know Sarxos better than anyone they’ve got. That’s why they asked us to go in in the first place. Because we’re best…”

She looked up at Leif, grinned, and got up. “I’m with you,” she said. “Look, I’m not sure what time I’ll get into the game tonight. Opting out of family night is going to take some explaining.”

“Okay…well, I’ll go in before you, and wait for you — and I’ll leave some transit in your account. We’ll meet in Errint, and see if we can catch Fettick first and warn him off. The place is just a little city-state, kind of like Minsar. When you get to the city, there’s a little cookshop just inside the third wall, a place called Attila’s.”

Megan raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Leif said, “they make good chili there. I’ll sit there and amuse myself until you get there. Then we’ll go in and engineer a chat with Fettick…take our time and make sure he understands.”

“All right,” Megan said. “We do have to try. But talking someone out of a campaign is going to be interesting.”

“I think we can change his mind. After that, we can start looking around for some more indicators to what’s really going on. I’m sure we can crack this if we just have a little more time….”

“Right. I’ll see you tonight, then.”

She vanished.

Leif came to Errint in the late afternoon of a clearing golden day. The city stood in a small glacial valley associated with the furthest eastward-flung massif of the great northern Highpeak range. Sometime far back in the place’s apparent geological history, when the continent of Sarxos was supposed to have been glaciated, a huge broad-bottomed river of ice had come grinding slowly down from the wide and snowy cirque of Mount Holdfast above the valley, and had burred the valley down into a long, gentle U-shaped trough nearly nine miles long. Now the glacier was gone, retreated to the very feet of Holdfast, with only the telltale threaded stream running down from the glacier’s terminal moraine left winding down the valley, in a meander of scattered white rounded stones and the peculiar milky green-white water that betrayed a riverbed covered with glacial “flour.”

Up on a little spur of stone that somehow had avoided being ground down by the glacier, Errint rose. It had been a wooden city in its earliest incarnations, but it kept burning down, and so it was finally rebuilt in stone, and its sign and sigil became the phoenix. Its population was not large, but they were famous: sturdy, independent mountain people, dangerous in battle, good with a halberd or a crossbow. They tended to keep themselves to themselves and not mix in foreign wars…unless the pay was good. Their city had a small but steady source of wealth from the salt and iron mines in the mountain, which they controlled jealously, telling no one the secrets of the labyrinthine ways in and out. They farmed the long, gentle, stony valley in a small way, oats and barley mostly, and tried to mind their own business.

That had become less easy of late. Argath’s rise in the Northlands had meant that the kingdoms on the fringes of his realm had started looking for allies, or buffer states that would protect them from the unfriendly neighbor just over the mountain passes. To the countries to the north — meaning Argath — and to the south — meaning the realms of Duke Morgon and others — Errint looked like a perfect possibility: a small population unlikely to put up much of a fight; ground not worth much except as a buffer, so that battles fought across it wouldn’t ruin its value; and the mines, source of the peerless Holdfast iron, much sought after in Sarxos for weapons.

The Errint did not take kindly to the thought of being anybody’s buffer state, however. When Argath first came down out of the mountains to annex them, they had fought him and driven him back. Just last year they had done it again. But then Argath had twice made the mistake of attacking into the teeth of their weather, which the Errint knew better than anyone. Even in the summer, those somnolent-looking dolomite peaks could wrap