The Deadliest Game

“Fine.” Wayland straightened up from his work. “Well, then, youngster…”

Leif raised a hand in casual farewell, and walked away through the market, looking idly at the few things still laid out on the stalls: bolts of cloth, a last few tired-looking cheeses.

He was glad to have run into Wayland. The man was a noticing type, worth knowing. Leif had known him for quite a while, since his first battle in Sarxos after picking up the healing-stone. They had in fact met in a field hospital, since farriers, skilled with hot metal and the cautery, were much in demand on battlefields where magic- workers couldn’t be found. Wayland had been surprisingly gentle with the men he had been treating, for all that the treatment itself was brutal. He missed little of the detail of what was going on around him, and had a phenomenal memory. At the moment, Leif was glad of the possibility to talk over Sarxonian matters with someone besides Megan. A variety of viewpoints never hurt.

He wandered back out in the direction of the cookshop. And his heart jumped inside him as someone tapped his shoulder from behind.

He spun away from the tap, as his mother had taught him, and came around with his hand on his knife.

It was Megan.

She gave Leif a wry look. “I thought you said you were going to meet me inside the cookshop.”

“Oh…sorry. I got distracted. I ran into somebody I knew.”

“You mean you haven’t been in to pig out on the chili yet?”

His stomach abruptly growled. “Chili,” he said.

Megan grinned. “Come on,” she said — and then paused at the sound of a voice raised in peculiar song on the other side of the market stalls.

“What the frack is that?” Megan said. The voice was accompanying itself on something very like a ukelele.

Now I will sing of the doleful maid,

And a doleful maid was she,

Who lost her love to the merman’s child

In the waves of the great salt sea—

The owner of the voice, if you could call it that, came wandering out among the awnings and the tables, trailed by the raucous laughter and catcalls of some of the stall-keepers as the song got ruder. Its source was the dwarf in the noisy motley. He paused by one of the stalls, a fruit stall in the process of being packed up, and began strumming rather atonal chords one-handed, while trying to snatch pieces of fruit with the other. The fruit-seller, a big florid woman with a walleye, finally lost her temper and hit the dwarf over the head with an empty basket. He fell over, picked himself up again, and scampered away, laughing a nasty little high-pitched laugh reminiscent of a cartoon cockroach.

Megan stared after him. “What was that?” Leif said to the fruit-seller.

“Gobbo,” said the fruit-seller.

“Sorry?” Megan said.

“Gobbo. That’s Duke Mengor’s poxy little dwarf. Some kind of minstrel he is.”

“No kind of minstrel, madam, not with that voice,” said one of the butcher’s men who was going by with a quarter beef-carcass on his back.

“Some kind of jester, too,” said the fruit-seller. “And some kind of nuisance. Always running around, picking and thieving and looking for trouble. Getting under people’s skirts…”

“You’re just jealous ’cause he didn’t want to get under your skirt, madam,” said another of the stall-keepers who was packing up.

The fruit-seller rounded on the man and began to assail his ears with such a flow of language that the stall- keeper hurriedly vanished behind someone else’s stall. Leif chuckled a little and turned back toward Attila’s. Megan stood there a moment, gazing off toward where the dwarf had vanished.

“I don’t know why,” she said to Leif, “but he looks familiar….”

“Yeah….” Leif looked where she did, and then said, “I’ll tell you why. You saw him in Minsar.”

“I did? Maybe I did.” Then she remembered the strange little figure with the sword, running through the torchlit marketplace, laughing that bizarre little laugh. She shuddered — she couldn’t quite figure out why. “If he was all the way over there,” she said softly, “what’s he doing all the way over here of a sudden?”

Leif took her arm and tugged her toward Attila’s. “Look,” he said, “we were all the way over there, and now we’re all the way over here. Nothing odd about it.”

“You sure?” Megan said.

She watched Leif get that thinking look…and slowly the look began to shift into something else: suspicion.

“I wonder,” he said.

“So do I. But first things first,” Megan said, and this time it was she who took Leif’s arm. “It’s tough to wonder on an empty stomach.”

“All right,” he said. “And then…afterwards…we have a meeting.”

“Oh?”

“Come on…I’ll tell you all about it. Assuming I can talk at all while we’re eating. This chili is so hot—”

“How hot is it?”

“They use it to discipline dragons.”

“Come on. I’m ready!”

About an hour later, they were both sitting alone in a corner at Attila’s, trying to recover from their dinner. “I can’t believe I ate that,” Megan said. “I can’t believe I ate that twice.” She was looking at the remains of her second bowl.

Leif chuckled, and had a swig of his drink. There was no cure for Attila’s chili except cold sweet tea with cream, so both of them were drinking that, out of tall ceramic cups.

“I feel sorry for the dragons you were mentioning,” Megan said.

Leif cocked an eye at the window. “It’s getting close enough to sunset,” Leif said. “We should probably go ahead.”

“Okay. But finish telling me what you started to,” Megan said, “about Wayland.”

“Oh, no, I was finished.”

“It was something about his name.”

“Oh, that…it’s a just a generic name for a wandering smith. A small joke. But he’s a good one. And he gets around. He hears a lot. There was something else I was going to mention before we went to see him, though.”

Leif glanced around them. The lady who owned Attila’s had gone out to stand in the cool of the approaching evening, leaning against the door opening into the marketplace plaza, where she was chatting with some passerby.

Leif said quietly, “Before I came into Sarxos today, I wanted to do some work on something else that occurred to me.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you said that there had to be some more systematic way to go about this search for the ‘bouncer.’ It seemed to me that you were right. So I thought, if it’s not a question of who’s beating Argath in battle — because plainly we’re meant to think that it is — then the question becomes who, what player or character, has also been beaten in battles or skirmishes by the same people? By all the same people who’ve beaten Argath?”

Megan looked at him thoughtfully. “See,” Leif said, “you have to consider the problem as if it were a problem in set theory, something you could set up as a Venn diagram, something that looks sort of like a Sarxos version of a MasterCard logo. You have to look at the whole history of battle in Sarxos for a couple of years, to see where there are overlaps in terms of who was fighting who. And the overlaps have to be exact, for the cover to be successful. Do you follow me?”

Megan blinked and then nodded. She knew analysis was one of Leif’s strong points; it was just slightly startling to see him pull it out of the hat like this. “Okay,” she said. “So what did you find?”