The Deadliest Game

“Not a word.”

Shel raised his eyebrows, encouraged. Delmond was known for his tendency to brag even when he had lost, as long as he thought he had a chance of getting out of a situation. “Good. Have you had anything to eat?”

“Not yet. Nick’s been out hunting. Got a deer — they’re butchering it. But no one wants to eat here really….”

“Why would they? And we won’t either. Send someone up toward Minsar to start some cooking fires outside the walls. We’ll encamp there tonight. And tell Alla I’ll hear her report now.”

Talch nodded, and let the tent-flap fall. Shel looked at it and wondered, as he sometimes did, whether Talch was a player or a construct, one of many “extra” personnel whom the game itself contained. There were plenty of them, since most people preferred to play more interesting characters than guards and camp-followers; though you never could tell. One of the greatest generals of the twenty-two-year-run of Sarxos, the cavalry-master Alainde, had spent nearly two years playing a laundryman in the service of Grand Duke Erbin before beginning his startling rise through the ranks. At any rate, in the etiquette of Sarxos, “Are you a player?” was not a question you ever asked. It “broke the spell.”

If a player chose to come out to you, that was different, and afterwards you thanked them for their trust. But there were tens of thousands of players in Sarxos who preferred to remain anonymous as to both their names and their status, people who might dip into the Virtual Domain for an evening’s enjoyment every now and then, or who might come in night after night, as Shel did, in pursuit of something specific — amusement, excitement, adventure, revenge, power — or just escape from a real world whose reality sometimes became just a little too grinding.

Shel took a long drink of the honeydraft, and sat and thought, pausing a moment to shake himself, and scratch. More pine needles down his tunic…it would be days before they were all gone. He would really have preferred to do the rest of this evening’s work in the morning, but there was no telling what kind of trickery Delmond might attempt to pull if he were allowed the time. Even in his present strong position, Shel couldn’t ignore Delmond’s slippery reputation. The man’s mother, Tarasp of the Hills, was a wizard-lordling, one notoriously nonaligned, who shifted stances between Light and Dark without warning. From her Delmond had inherited both some small measure of power as a shapeshifter, and a dangerous shiftiness of temperament that made him capable of signing a peace treaty with one hand while holding, spell-concealed in the other, the knife intended for your guts. Once he had actually attempted such an assassination in a tent where he was supposed to be coming to terms with someone else who had beaten him in battle. There were people in the game who admired this kind of tactic, but Shel didn’t think much of it, and had no intention of falling foul of it now.

In the meantime, Shel wasn’t too worried about the success of any assassination attempt on him. Leaning against the tentpole, unsheathed, was his hand-and-a-half broadsword: a very simple-looking implement, gray steel with a slight blue sheen. It had many names, but then most swords in Sarxos did — the ones that were worth anything anyway. The sword that people around here called Ululator (or Howler) had a nasty reputation, and was well known for its ability to protect its master without him having to actually handle it. Few heard Ululator’s scream and lived to tell about it.

Shel cocked his head at the sound of footsteps outside, and the sound of complaints, and then emphatic swearing, in Elstern.

“Talch?”

A pause, and his guard stuck his head into the tent.

“Our boy getting impatient out there?” Shel asked.

His guard produced a sardonic grin and said, “Seems his dignity’s injured because we haven’t given him his own tent.”

“He should count himself lucky his dignity’s all that’s injured.”

“I think most of the camp would agree. Meanwhile, sir, Alla’s waiting, when you’re ready to start.”

“Ask her to come in.”

“Right, sir.”

The tent-flap fell, then was tossed aside again. Alla came in, her mail ringing softly over her long deerskin tunic as she moved, and Shel’s heart bounced, as it had done for a while now when he looked at her after a fight. She was a valkyrie — not literally, but in body type: big, strong but not overmuscled, and dazzlingly blond, with a face that could go from friendly to feral in a matter of seconds…which it did, on the battlefield. She was another of the people about whom Shel was most curious in Sarxos. Was she real on both sides of the interface, or just this one? Again, he wouldn’t ask, but in Alla’s case, Shel’s reticence had just a little more to do with nervousness than etiquette. He would have been unhappy to find that there was no Alla in the real world, and to find that there was one would immediately have raised the question And what are you going to do about it? For the time being, he left well enough alone. But someday, he thought, someday I’m going to find a way to work around to the subject myself…ever so gradually. And if she wants to say anything, well…

“How are you feeling?” Shel said. “Did you see the barber?”

She sat down, making a face that suggested she didn’t much see the need. “Yes…he stitched the leg up all right. Didn’t take long. He says it’ll be healed tomorrow — he put one of those sustained-release spells on it. How about you? Got the shakes out of your system yet?”

“Please,” said Shel. “It’ll be a week or more. I hate battles.”

Alla rolled her eyes expressively. “You must…you have so many of them. You want the accounting now?”

“Yes.”

“Of our forces: one hundred ninety-six dead, three hundred forty wounded, twelve of those critical. Of Delmond’s: two thousand fourteen dead, a hundred and sixty-odd wounded, forty critical.”

Shel whistled softly. The news of this spectacular success would spread. It might keep some of the more land-hungry or fight-hungry denizens of Sarxos’s South Continent out of his hair for a while. Many would think superior strategy had been involved. Even more would think it had been magic…which suited Shel. “Other captives?”

“Thirty unwounded infantry captives. Not a lot of unhurt nobles, maybe ten. Almost all the rest of them are wounded, or went down fighting. Everybody else not accounted for seems to have run away, southward mostly.”

“Back to his cities. What’s the matter with these people? Do they like being cavalry fodder?”

Alla shrugged. She was not overly political. Her preferences ran to fighting and eating, though what she did with the calories was an eternal mystery to Shel, and a cause for some envy. If he even looked sideways at a meatpie or a haunch of roast boar, he gained weight. “Anything else?” Shel said.

“You might want to look at the contents of their baggage train,” Alla said, pulling a piece of parchment out of her tunic and handing it to him.

Shel scanned down it, and as he read, his mouth dropped open. “What the…What did he need all this stuff for?”

“Seems there was going to be a big victory party in Minsar tonight,” Alla said, stretching lazily, though her face was wearing that feral look. “Fancy clothes and fancy food and an exhibition of rich booty for the victors: ritual humiliation for the losers…the usual thing. Nooses around our necks, people pelting us with beef bones and pig knuckles.”

Shel snorted. “As if they were likely to find any. This is sheep country.”

“Yeah, well. Instead of his big victory dinner and massive boozefest, and instead of all the other local rulers getting very nervous, now Delmond gets the scraps, and we get his baggage train.”

Shel nodded, though he was still incredulously reading the baggage manifest. “The absolute stupidity of bringing all this stuff along…I can’t believe he’s this naive…he must be up to something. I wonder. Who has Delmond been dealing with lately that it would be to his advantage to make them think he’s stupid, or mad?”

Alla raised her eyebrows. “Us?”

Shel glanced at her. “You suggesting that he threw us this battle on purpose? Walked into the trap despite expecting it to be there?”