The Deadliest Game

tent and said, “A word in your ear, lord, if I may…”

Shel nodded.

“His mother is not a safe person to offend. If harm should come to her son on the road — your own play could be damaged.”

Shel sat quiet for a moment. “Boldly spoken,” he said then. “And possibly even true. I take your warning at its face value, Azure Alaunt.”

The herald bowed and slipped out of the tent.

Shel sat still for a moment more, chewing his lip in a thoughtful way. “A little twitchy, that lad,” said Alla, getting up and stretching.

“Maybe. Come on,” Shel said, getting up as well. “Let’s have the baggage people get this tent down, and get ourselves up the road to Minsar and our dinners. We’ve done a good day’s work.”

Alla nodded, and went out of the tent.

A moment later, Shel went out into the near-darkness, too, and walked off a short distance through the red sticky mud, trying to find a solid spot. Finally he found one, a place that by some magic had not been completely poached into mire by the thousands of hooves, and looked southward at the first moon, the smaller one, now floating low over the mist.

He turned to look north, toward Minsar, between the wooded hills. In the moonlight, the upward-reaching tips of the pine trees were slightly paler than the rest of the branches: polished matte-silver as opposed to the slightly tarnished silver and shadow-black of the trees. It had just turned spring in the South Continent, and by daylight you would correctly see the color at the tips of the conifers as that particular shade of new young green. Elsewhere would be the thin faint veiling of green on the opening buds of the oaks and maples; everything shone fresh and new. The fields were dazzling in the mornings; besides the yellow of nevermind in the grass, and the white of the South Continent daisy that comes after the snow, there was other whiteness, too — the new lambs, bouncing around on unsteady legs in the new spring sunshine, astounded and overjoyed to be alive. So when you got the news that somebody like Delmond was at your borders, about to cross over and stamp everything into a bloody pulp — the villages, the people, the lambs, and the daisies, everything that mattered and many things that hadn’t, until now — you got cranky, and you stood up to defend the place.

Shel had started doing that, much to his own surprise, some while back. Shel rarely saw daisies except at the florist’s down the road, and had never seen a lamb that wasn’t in plastic-wrapped pieces at the supermarket meat counter, but in Sarxos he had come to know what flowers, and livestock, meant to country people, to the smallfarmers and smallholders among whom he had moved. And when he had first “settled” and made this part of Sarxos his home-away-from-home, and someone else in Sarxos had come along, intent on taking the livestock, and killing the people and the daisies — not even out of need, but out of what that person considered political expediency — Shel had said, “The hell with that,” and had started raking together an army.

That first battle now seemed a long time ago…that, and the problems that followed “saving his country” for the first time. Armies, no matter how small — and his was — have a distressing tendency to want to be paid. If their pay is late, they tend to go elsewhere, or turn on you. Shel had found ways to pay them, out of his own pocket sometimes, thereby acquiring a reputation among other generals and rulers in Sarxos as an eccentric.

Then, along had come the original rulers of “his country,” roused from long neglect of it by the action: rulers who felt (with some cause) that Talairn was their property, and who disliked someone raising an army to defend it without their permission. That particular disagreement had gone on for nearly a year, until the rulers realized that fighting with Shel was getting them nowhere, and that the price he was offering them, to buy them off, was actually pretty good. After that, by and large, he had been left alone…except by the likes of Delmond. When people like him turned up in Talairn, Shel stomped them as best he could…because he had fallen in love with the place. He knew that was always dangerous. Love, and you were likely to be wounded.

But some wounds were worth it.

Shel stood there for a few breaths more, looking out at the moonlight, and then said: “Gameplay ends here.”

Everything around him suddenly acquired the perfectly frozen look of a still photograph or holo. “Options,” said the voice of the server that controlled the “frame” for the virtual experience. “Continue: save: save and continue.”

“Save,” Shel said. “Accounting, please.”

“Saved. Accounting for Shel Lookbehind,” said the master games computer, as the frozen backdrop began, slowly, to dissolve into process-blue. “Balance carried forward from previous gameplay: four thousand eight hundred sixteen points. Score accrued in this session: five hundred sixty points. Total balance: five thousand three hundred seventy-six points. Query?”

“No query,” Shel said.

“Confirming accounting accepted, no query. Read waiting messages now?”

“Save for later,” said Shel.

“Acknowledged,” said the master games computer. “Please enter your personal satchel codes for an archival save of this result.”

Shel blinked twice, summoning up his computer’s copy of the satchel code “signature” that infallibly verified the game’s results as his own to the master games computer. The signature was complex, too much so for an opponent to fake. One part of the code changed with each session, and was combined with a second part, which resided permanently in his machine, and a third, which the “master” Sarxos machine maintained. Shel nodded to the computer, locking in his “save.”

“Save confirmed,” said the computer. He blinked a little, realizing for the first time that its voice was really a lot like Alla’s. “This session of Sarxos^SM is completed. Sarxos is copyrighted by Christopher Rodrigues, 1999, 2000, 2003–2010, and subsequent years. All rights reserved universe-wide and in all other universes that may be discovered.”

And everything vanished. Once more Shel was sitting in a room crammed with books and tapes and all the other impedimenta of his life, including (taking up most of the room) the big easy chair that let him line up his implant with the link in his home computer. There Shel sat, yawning, in the flesh rather than “in the flash,” at six in the morning in his apartment in Cincinnati, with the dawn beginning to lever its way in through the blinds, and his flesh began to complain to him that after a long night of campaigning, it was stiff and sore. The machinery was supposed to speak to your muscles a few times an hour, to keep them contracting, but sometimes these routine movements just weren’t enough to get rid of the excess lactic acid that built up in the big muscles when you were under stress. Because of this, steady long-term players were likely to do weights and get a lot of exercise on a regular basis. There might be a stereotype that suggested people who VR’d too much were thin and flabby, but Sarxos players tended toward a surprisingly high level of fitness. You could hardly campaign effectively enough to win a kingdom if your body wouldn’t support your gameplay.

Meanwhile, his body was saying something very specific to him. CORNFLAKES! it shouted. CORNFLAKES AND MILK!

Shel got up and stretched, grinning at the thought of something to eat, and at the look on Delmond’s face when he had realized he wasn’t going to be cut loose with his assets intact for the sake of pleasing his mother. Tarasp of the Hills, Shel thought, looking for his housekeys. What are we going to do about you, lady? You’re a menace, even to your own flesh and blood. I’ve got to talk to the wizards about this….

He changed into a less-rumpled T-shirt, locked his apartment, and went down the stairs to the street two at a time in an extremely cheerful mood. Despite it being a Saturday, he wouldn’t be free today. Evening shift at the hospital started at three-thirty. It would be yet another exciting evening of drawing blood and collecting labwork samples on about a hundred patients, every one of whom loathed the sight of him. Yet despite all this, as he swung into the convenience store and got his cornflakes and his milk, and then spent ten minutes or so shooting the breeze with Ya Chen, the night lady, before she went off shift, Shel’s heart sang. What a terrific campaign. What a terrific battle. I can’t wait to start dealing with the can of worms that this will have cracked open….

All the way back from the 7–11 he was laying plans…thinking about which players he needed to consult. The continuing threat from the Dark Lord was on his mind. Exactly what had he meant by that offer to “buy” Delmond? The amount offered had been three times Delmond’s potential ransom value. Unless it was