The Deadliest Game

Shel reached across his map table and poked the smoking scrap of parchment with his knife, wishing privately that the ink on it would stop smoking. The effect was unsettling, and he kept worrying that the note would set fire to something valuable. “Not a ransom offer. It’s an offer to buy you. And there are about two hundred other generals, lords and ladies, and petty and grand nobility of the Great and Virtual Dominion of Sarxos, who would strongly suggest that I take the offer. However, I don’t like slavery much, and I’m persuaded by my quartermaster that it would be much better business to simply asset-strip you and turn you out to beg for your bread on the roads, so that the peasants whose lives you’ve made miserable by burning their fields and destroying their livelihoods can throw herdbeast patties at you as you pass.”

Delmond shivered visibly. “Surely it would be more useful to you, politically speaking I mean, to impound my army and send me and my property home with a suitable escort—”

“Excuse me?” Shel stuck one finger in his ear and began digging. “I could have sworn I heard you claim to have an army. That pitiful crowd of leftover wannabe skinheads in the corral out there, the bike-chained, the saggy-butted, those two hundred people with no horses and no weapons: that army? Oh.”

It had long been said of Delmond that he could not understand irony. Shel now found this to be true. “Not this army,” Delmond said hurriedly. “My other one.”

Shel laughed out loud. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you do have another one stashed away somewhere, which I’m not sure I believe, they won’t be yours for long. Not after word of this afternoon gets out.” And Shel very much hoped that this was true. It was likely enough that Delmond could have another army… but that was no admission that Shel was prepared to make today. “And even if you have another, why would I want it, considering the quality of your troops? If ‘quality’ is the word I’m looking for.”

“Land, then.”

Shel sighed. “I don’t want your lands.” Much, he thought, but this was no time to discuss his personal ambitions with Delmond. Today’s battle was part of a long string of initiatives discussed with two other Sarxonian generals whom Shel trusted…well, trusted as far as you could trust anyone who was playing in Sarxos: about throwing distance, usually. If things went well, sometime in the next few months Shel would come in and take Delmond’s lands by force, and everybody in Sarxos, including the people who lived there, would wholeheartedly approve the change. For the moment, though, Shel said, “No thanks. I’m much more interested in your portable assets, and it serves you right to lose them. I can’t imagine why you carry all this junk around with you, except that you’re too spoiled to eat off normal dishes in the field, like everyone else. Half an acre of brocade for one tent, half a ton of gold plate, a dozen suits of ceremonial armor, a brigade of dancing girls…”

“You cannot take these things from me! They are the royal regalia of my house from time immemorial —”

“Delmond, I’ve taken them already. You lost the fight today. This is the ‘dictating terms’ part of the battle. Haven’t you noticed? And anyway, you stole nine-tenths of this stuff from Elansis of Schirholz a year and a half ago. Sacked her castle when only her little brother the Young Landgrave was home, with an insufficient force to defend it. Very nasty, Delmond, stealing the family silver from nine-year-olds. I guess it’s no wonder you won’t leave this stuff at home. You’re afraid someone might try the same trick on you. Well, you’ve outsmarted yourself, because all this stuff now counts as ‘spoils of war,’ having been taken fair and square on the battlefield. If you’d left it home, no one would be able to touch it.

“—But Elansis’ll be really glad to get the Eye of Argon back again. It’ll mean that something will grow in Schirholz’s fields this year, and Telairn will acquire a couple of powerful allies that will raise eyebrows from here to the Sundown Sea. That will serve you right, too. I can’t believe you stole that thing. It’s common knowledge that the Crimson Emerald will bring ruin on anyone who handles it except members of the Landgrave’s House. Don’t tell me your mother put you up to that, too?”

Delmond acquired a stunned expression. Shel considered it a moment, and filed it away under “Mothers/stepmothers, wicked, extreme caution when dealing with.” “Right,” Shel said. “Meanwhile, your surviving nobles will be cared for and ransomed as per the usual procedure. Fortunately, we have had a good number of offers for them. Your surviving infantry will spend a month at labor in Minsar, by way of reparation for the damage they’ve caused to Talairn territory, and they’ll then be released. Who knows, some of them may want to stay with us afterwards. A poorly fed looking lot, they are.

“You, however, will have a meal tonight and a meal in the morning, and then we’ll give you the statutory skin of water and bag of bread and meat, and a horseman will take you ten miles back into your borderlands so that you can start walking home. You might get there by midsummer, if you don’t dawdle. The collar stays on, by the way. Flying back home in bird or bat shape wouldn’t give you nearly enough time to reflect on the error of your ways.”

Delmond turned a wonderful color of puce, drew a long breath, and began saying dreadful things about Shel’s background and parentage. He was just starting to hit his stride when a soft moaning noise began radiating from near the tentpole. Ululator was shivering slightly, just enough so that you could see the patternwelding in the metal shift and move, as if the steel breathed, and the howling got louder. It was like the sound a tomcat makes when threatening another tom…except this was louder, and the threat was absolutely personal, like the angry note in your mother’s voice when she works out why you’ve been in the bathroom with the door locked for so long.

Delmond abruptly gulped and went silent. “I think you should moderate your language,” Shel said. “Howler has been known to get out of my tent at night and go about her own business — I wouldn’t go so far as to say her ‘lawful occasions’; the things she does aren’t always strictly legal. But I always pay for the funerals afterwards.”

Delmond was now sitting very still.

“So that’s the way it’s going to be,” said Shel. “Azure Alaunt, as a constituted herald of the Dominion, say you now: Is the disposition within the law?”

“It is within the law,” said the herald, looking with slight nervousness at his employer.

“Fine. I will now hear any formal protest of the disposition.”

Delmond fought first for air, then for words, and after a moment, he burst out, “None of this would have happened if you had not had magic on your side! It was not horses that bore you down the hillsides at us, but devils! We will find out where to get such demons of our own, and then we will crush you where you—”

“They come from Altharn, mostly,” said Shel mildly. “A nice little stud farm up there. I own it. We crossbreed our black Delvairns with the mountain ponies, and there’s rumored to be a secret ingredient in the mixture…possibly goat. Don’t think you’ll have much luck with them, though, Delmond. They bite, and you just have to put up with it…because it’s their spirit that makes them so surefooted.”

“Spirits!” cried Delmond, turning to Azure Alaunt. “Did you hear that? He admits it, they were spirits, familiars!”

Azure Alaunt glanced ever so briefly at Shel — an expression of utter hopelessness that his master did not see, and that made Shel wonder if, at some much later date, he should offer the man a job.

“Mmmm,” said Shel to Delmond. “Not your usual level of response. Things must be getting tough down at the WalMart.”

Delmond went rather darker than puce. It was not considered in the very best taste to refer inside Sarxos to a player’s “real life” outside. The game was supposed to be a relief from “outside,” after all, a place where the players could leave the pressures and mundanity of their lives, and experience something bigger and more exotic in company with many others intent on the same thing. But then lots of things happened in Sarxos that were not strictly “by the book,” a fact that the game’s creator apparently took as an indicator that the game was progressing correctly, and was in fact becoming its own place, its own self…something slightly alive. And anyway, Delmond had bent a fair number of the rules himself in this engagement. Turnabout was fair play, Shel thought.

“All right,” Shel said. “The disposition is made. Talch?” The guard reapppeared. “Take him out and feed him. Then lock him up in a baggage cart for the move up the road — not one of his, one of ours. Who knows what little surprises he’s got built into his own equipment. Have the regulation beggar’s bag ready for him in the morning. And what the heck, why should we be stingy? Throw a lump of hard cheese in it.”

Shivering with rage, but silent now, Delmond was taken out. Azure Alaunt paused on the threshold of the