Edda

Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Ireland by The O’Brien Press Ltd., Dublin, 2011
Published in agreement with The O’Brien Press Ltd.

First published in the United States of America in 2011 by Viking,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kostick, Conor, date –
Edda / Conor Kostick.

p. cm.

Sequel to: Saga.

Summary: In the virtual world of Edda, ruler Scanthax decides he wants to invade another virtual world, embroiling the universes of Edda, Saga, and Epic in war, with only three teenagers to try to restore peace.

eISBN : 978-1-101-52933-1

[1. Fantasy games—Fiction. 2. Role playing—Fiction. 3. Video games—Fiction. 4. War—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.K85298Ed 2011

[Fic]—dc22

2011003000

S.A. Set in Electra

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BOOKS BY CONOR KOSTICK

EPIC
SAGA
EDDA

Lord Scanthax’s map of the known worlds:

Chapter 1

HOW TO MOTIVATE A PRINCESS

“When the humans
abandoned us, there were almost a thousand lords and ladies who were determined to win control of Edda. One of the least noted of them, residing in an obscure mountain-covered domain, was Lord Scanthax.”

Ambassador and Princess were alone in the darkened viewing room, looking at a large screen on which a broadcast was playing. The screen was currently showing an illustration: a physical map of the world of Edda, rather poorly drawn by modern standards. And as the slightly patronizing voice continued its “history,” the image zoomed in on the peninsula under discussion. Having seen the film hundreds of times, Ambassador looked tiredly at the girl beside him and was about to speak, but she anticipated this with a slight frown and shake of her head, concentrating on the story.

Boredom was a sensation that Ambassador could tolerate, but for the last hour he had also been experiencing a disturbing upsurge of an even more unpalatable emotion. The particular combination of guilt and sadness that troubled him was so unfamiliar that it took Ambassador a while to name the feeling. It was pity. He pitied Penelope, the poor human girl whose avatar, Princess, sat beside him. Pity was not an emotion that served any practical purpose and Ambassador hoped that it would soon subside.

“Theoretically, all lordships were of equal value. What Lord Scanthax lost in good agricultural lands he gained in minerals and a strong defensive position. But in the wild scramble for survival that followed the departure of the humans, Lord Scanthax would certainly have been overwhelmed but for the assistance of a brave and clever little human girl. Penelope was his secret and he deserved to have her. For, alone of all the lords, Scanthax had devoted precious time and energy to the human world. There he discovered a little baby had been left behind at the time of the exodus.”

The film cut away from the map of Lord Scanthax’s domain to a black-and-white recording taken from the perspective of a robot in the human world. It was leaning over a small cot in which a baby was crying. A moment later, however, when the robot produced a bottle of milk, the baby’s shrieks were replaced by a gentle sucking sound. At this point Penelope paused the film.

“This is supposed to be the moment I was found?” There was a skeptical note in the girl’s voice and Ambassador was hesitant.

“You doubt it?” he asked her in return.

“Well, it’s bloody convenient that the robot had a bottle of milk on it, don’t you think?”

“Yes, indeed.”

The princess avatar was looking up at him through a fringe of long, wavy purple hair, clearly waiting for a more satisfactory response. She was becoming very difficult to deal with. A fifteen-year-old human caused no end of trouble in comparison with a hundred-year-old enemy diplomat.

“Well. This film was made a long time ago, to teach you the history of Lord Scanthax in a way that made sense when you were nine.”

“It doesn’t make sense now.”

“I suspect that scene was a reconstruction.”

“Exactly. Which raises the question, what did the original footage look like?”

“Perhaps there was none.”

“Don’t you know?” She was skeptical again; it was a tone of voice Ambassador was becoming more and more familiar with. The mistrust it expressed was most troubling.

“Would you like me to check?”

“Yes. Find the earliest true footage of me as a baby, please.” Penelope signaled for the film to resume.

“Princess?”

“Hush.”

“But you must have watched this so often that it cannot possibly interest you now.” There was something unhealthy about Penelope’s renewed perusal of the documentary, and in any case, Ambassador was eager to divert her energies to the new and urgent project that Lord Scanthax had assigned her.

“The first few years were the most anxious for Lord Scanthax. He sought peace with his neighbors—in the main by giving them favorable trading agreements—and devoted all his resources to building wooden defenses across the mountain passes, along with the soldiers to occupy them. This chain of forts would have been no deterrent to a serious invasion by lords whose fruitful lands and early income had allowed for the creation of strong armies in the first few years. But, aided by the construction of dedicated diplomatic units, Lord Scanthax managed to avert such a disaster by offering timely gifts and by stirring up conflict among his rivals.”

This part of the film was mildly interesting to Ambassador, for it showed some of the early diplomatic units: crude male and female humanoids whose gowns and capes identified them as having a non-military function. His sense of being had evolved from one of these early diplomats, and Ambassador still had fragmentary recollections of early missions from that era.

“At last, though, Lord Scanthax’s dedication to the human child bore fruit. At the age of six Penelope scripted her first object: a red ball.”

Here the film showed a little human girl in a play area, monitored by two robots. It made Ambassador wince to see how grimy the child looked; how pathetic were her rough wooden toy animals scattered around her on the floor, and how crude was the simple smock that she wore. Inside his own world, Edda, Lord Scanthax could give Penelope anything she wanted, but in the human world every task required enormous resources. Right now, her avatar was wearing a crimson ball gown; a diamond tiara glittered in her hair; while beautiful flashes of blue came from Princess’s sapphire earrings and necklace. The avatar lived in a castle more grandiose than any human could have ever known and its enormous scale made the scenes from the playpen seem all the more shameful. The film could even be misinterpreted. Despite the fact that they had explained it to her often enough, might Penelope have reached the conclusion that the squalor depicted in the films displayed a lack of concern on their part for her welfare?

In the film, the child was now putting on a headset and gloves. This scene, thought Ambassador appreciatively, still had the power to thrill. For this was the whole point of Lord Scanthax’s plan. Only a human could access the menus that allowed for the world of Edda to be re-scripted. There had once been a thousand or so sentient lords and ladies in Edda, but not one of them could reach out to alter the programs that underlay their existence. Although she did not know it at the time, the six-year-old human girl was more powerful and dangerous than generals and admirals in command of enormous hosts.

The image on the screen jumped from the squalid room in which Penelope lived to show her avatar in Edda, still a child but now properly dressed as a princess and in the impressive surroundings of a wizard’s laboratory.

“Penelope was a very intelligent girl and a very fast learner. After only a few weeks, she was able to script an iron bar that could be used by blacksmiths to make pikes and even swords. Before her seventh birthday, she was scripting more iron for Lord Scanthax than could be matched by the production of all of his mines put together.

“This new stream of such a precious resource meant that Lord Scanthax could continue his policy of being generous in trading and yet at the same time build an army with fiercer teeth than any of his rivals could possibly anticipate. In this period, of course, Lord Scanthax remained entirely on the defensive. There was still a very long way to go.

“Penelope, however, was lonely. As she grew old enough to understand that she had been abandoned by her human family, she become sad and spent many nights crying in bed. Lord Scanthax appreciated her feelings and did what he could for the little girl. He assigned her a diplomat of considerable autonomy, created many farming units for her to interact with, and several times came in person to play with her.”

The next scene was painful to watch. Really, they should have deleted the film a long time ago, after it had served its purpose. Ambassador cringed as Lord Scanthax, in his regular apparel—a suit of plate armor—played hopscotch clumsily with the avatar of the human girl. With the faintest shake of his head, Ambassador stole a glance at the figure beside him, the avatar now no longer a girl in simple clothing but a young woman in the most intricate and finely embroidered attire that could be found in any of the four known worlds. Princess’s expression remained enigmatic. Was she amused by the scene? Insulted? So much depended on her goodwill, even now, after nine years of constant effort on all their parts.

“And Penelope responded by working harder and harder to please Lord Scanthax. They concentrated on the iron bars, making them more and more effective, until the weapons produced from them were the strongest and sharpest in the world. These Lord Scanthax kept to himself, trading only inferior ores to his neighbors.

“Penelope wanted a pony for her eighth birthday and surprised Lord Scanthax with Rascal. What extraordinary talent! Her savior had thought her capable of scripting only inanimate objects, but here was a pony, a little peculiar and hard to ride, but a pony nonetheless. It meant that in time, Lord Scanthax could look forward to controlling warhorses, or war elephants, and perhaps even to obtaining troop units scripted by Penelope without having to invest resources in costly buildings, skilled artisans, and raw materials.”

Ambassador could remember Rascal, even without the aid of the film. At that time he was merely a diplomat with a tiny fraction of the life force of Lord Scanthax, but even so, he had been self-aware enough to join in the celebrations of the achievement and revel in the success of the lord’s policy of investing energy in the upkeep of a human child. They were not only going to survive; they were going to win! The pony may have looked all wrong, like a child’s drawing. It may have walked with a limp, had an astonishing golden mane and pink hooves. But it lived. The human girl had scripted a living creature.

“Whatever happened to Rascal?” Penelope turned her avatar to face him and Ambassador’s heart picked up its pace.

“Why, I’m sure he is out there somewhere . . .” He gestured vaguely beyond the stained glass windows to her left, to where there were many pastures with herds of horses.

“I must look him up someday. The poor thing.”

“But it was when she first scripted a rifle that Lord Scanthax knew she had truly saved the realm.”

The rifle on the screen was a poor version of their standard-issue weapon. There had been a lot of problems with it. Most of the time, Version One did not fire. Then when she got the gun to fire, it would sometimes have just one shot. But they had persisted. Day after day the child tried different scripts. There had been tantrums aplenty. At times it seemed impossible to work with so irrational a creature as a human. But where rational argument failed, praise succeeded. Ambassador had learned as much about human psychology as the child had learned about scripting.

The art of managing Penelope was to give her infrequent praise. Offering no praise quickly led to her being unmotivated. But constantly praising her did not produce the best results, either. No, by limiting his thanks and expressions of appreciation to relatively infrequent moments, Lord Scanthax had kept Penelope in a state of mind where she was pathetically grateful when such positive feedback came her way. That was why they had decided to make this film, in fact, and for a while it had succeeded. Now, however, praise rarely elicited an increased devotion to work. Was it possible that human psychology changed between the years of nine and fifteen?

It seemed unlikely. What evolutionary purpose would such a change serve? Or perhaps this particular human was defective in some way? There was no way of knowing whether Penelope was typical of her species or whether her unique upbringing had formed her into an aberrant example of
homo sapiens
.

“Thanks to his secret assistant, Lord Scanthax was now prepared to reach out and claim wealthier lands. But to take too bold a step would have been a mistake. Had he changed his pattern of behavior too dramatically, it would have aroused suspicion and possibly even brought about a confederation against him. Instead, Lord Scanthax gradually altered the favorable terms on which he had been trading with Lord Loadstone. As predicted, Loadstone decided the time had come to absorb Scanthax’s realm into his own. Loadstone’s son, Prince Inwen, brought a major army up to the mountains, where his pikes and bows proved no match for rifles.”

What a great day that had been: the bells ringing out all across the city, the colored streamers flying from every flagpole. Mostly for the girl’s benefit, of course, but not entirely. Despite Lord Scanthax’s commitment to efficiency in resource management, he was proud enough to want to celebrate so obvious a milestone. And there was the fact that his various manifestations had a fluctuating morale sufficiently independent of his own that it was worth giving them the opportunity to relish the victory.

“Soon Lord Loadstone was no more.”

In the original film there had been a different image at this point: Loadstone kneeling, head over the chopping block, before the ax came down. But the child’s response upon seeing such a moment of triumph was not the anticipated one of clapping and delight; instead she burst into tears and began to scream. So now the film simply displayed the world map of Edda, showing in pale green the growing region controlled by Lord Scanthax.

“Wasn’t there a shot of his head coming off once?”

“Indeed, Princess, but it seemed to displease you.”

“Well, that’s another thing I want. Show me the original version, please.”

“If we still have it.” Ambassador straightened his already perfect cravat. “Princess, if I might brief you again on urgent current affairs . . .”

“No, Ambassador, you may not. In any case, we are almost finished, aren’t we?”

“Well, there are a lot more battles and executions of various lords and ladies still to come.”

“Rats, you’re right. Skip a bit then. Go up to the end.”