Massively Multiplayer (29 page)

“What was he working on,” asked Bernardo, clearly fascinated.

“No idea. We were sharing text e-mails only, no visuals because of security at his job, and he couldn’t mention anything specific. I got the impression it had something to do with writing training simulations, which makes sense, given his background.”

“I see. Not his security expertise, then.”

“I don’t think so. Marcus was a genius, and he wrote us a very competent security system, but it’s not the best in the business. The obvious example would be the holes he’s exploiting right now, or his ability to tap into the intercom system.”

“Yes. Wait, doesn’t that mean he could be listening to us right now?” Momentarily panicked, Bernardo reached out and activated the anti-eavesdropping software on his desktop.

It didn’t really matter by that point, of course. Ms. Hernandez had heard enough.

The afternoon coach from Hasport to Minderley, Rooks’ Court, Whetstone Pass and the Sheer Crag left from the front of the Fouled Anchor Tavern at precisely two-fifty, Greenwich time. That made it almost eight o’clock at Trick’s apartment: a perilous time to be found in the dwelling of an undergraduate theater major between terms, Andrew had discovered.

The day before had been spent alternately sleeping, fiddling with the entertainment system and consuming leftover pizza, but the night had brought Trick’s friends out of the woodwork. An outlandish assortment of acting students, club-zombies, and neogoths had paraded through Trick’s doorway since sundown, most of them intent on inviting them both to some party or other which was being apparently being thrown as part of a primitive ritual to ward off the oncoming school term.

Andrew had politely declined, particularly when he saw the variety of chemical inducements being offered as additional enticement. Trick had eventually acceded to one group’s demands and vanished into the night, trailing a cloud of hallucinogenic vapor. “Don’t wait up,” he’d advised, and Andrew felt comfortable taking the notice seriously.

Trick had stumbled back in at about five in the morning, and insisted on regaling Andrew with tales of various unlikely debaucheries. Repeated ministrations of coffee had woken Andrew up, but done nothing for the obviously exhausted Trick, who retreated from the mounting sunlight to huddle in a whimpering mass under the covers of his bed. Thus it was with a sense of positive relief that Andrew finished the last of the coffee and plunged into the relatively banal world of Crucible.

Malcolm met him at the tavern’s front door, but merely grunted a greeting before preceding him into the darkness of the coach. A third traveler, a thin woman carrying an incongruously large duffel bag, joined them, her luggage occupying the fourth seat.

The carriage got off to a rickety start, looping through the back streets of Hasport and wending its way up the cobbled streets of the city until they reached the ridge crest overlooking the harbor. From here, Druin could see that the city was even larger than he could have guessed in last night’s fog. Towers, spires, and turreted mansion-houses made the blocky masses below him seem vaguely threatening, an impression bolstered by the sight of the thick city walls, crusted with flags and functional-looking siege machinery. Druin recognized catapults, ballistae, and even some of the canister-shaped magical cannons he’d seen on board the
August Rose
.

Vainly, he tried to direct Malcolm’s attention to the spectacle. “Suspicious bunch, aren’t they?” Malcolm just stared out the window, as he had since boarding.

“There’s good reason,” the thin woman declared. Hidden behind her enormous bag, Druin had almost forgotten her presence. “There are things to be suspicious of.”

“What things?”

“Things,” she repeated enigmatically.

They rolled through the massive ironwork gates of the city, and out onto a thin dirt track cutting through scrubby marshland and meadows covered in waist-high silvery grasses which shivered in the chill morning breeze.

Druin wanted to ask the thin woman for more details, but she had already turned her attention to the massive luggage. From a long case along its side, she withdrew a broad-bladed sword, which she laid across her knees. Another compartment yielded a complex-looking wood and metal apparatus, which unfolded into something between a boar spear and a harpoon gun. This she propped up near to her feet, its flat steel head jutting from the nearest window.

Druin took the hint and checked his gear. Malcolm just stared out the window. Druin gazed out the opposite side for a while, trying to remain alert for any attack, but was soon lulled by the unremitting spectacle of bog, meadow, and occasional gnarled trees.

Fifteen minutes into their ride, the coach began slowing. “Toll,” came the coachman’s voice from overhead. Druin, who had thought their passage paid when he’d bought their tickets from the clerk back at the Fouled Anchor, reached for his belt pouch, but the woman opposite him shook her head.

“It’s not
that
kind of toll, I’m afraid,” she said quietly.

“What do they want, then?”

She considered him for a moment. “You’re from Westerly, aren’t you? The accent. Never mind it, this time. I’ll take care of it.” Reaching into her pack once more, she withdrew three crystal vials, their contents a suspicious red liquid.

“Hey, that’s not—” he began, but she held a finger to her lips.

“It’s best we don’t talk about it,” she muttered. “And best we not see.” She pulled the head of the mounted spear-gun into the carriage and pulled down the velvet curtains, effectively blotting out the bleak landscape. Druin noticed she kept her weapons carefully pointed at the covered window. His own hands tensed on the hilts of his fighting knives, and even Malcolm seemed to have been drawn out of his mood by the looming sense of indeterminate threat.

“Toll,” came the voice from above once more.

All at once, a hand appeared through a window, poking its way around the edge of one velvet curtain. Druin bit his tongue in alarm, pulling at his knives, but froze again under the glare from the woman.

The hand was dead white, and while it was skeletally thin now, folds of scabrous old skin draped from the bones, as though the bearer had been much larger at one point.
Like when it was alive
, Druin couldn’t help thinking.

The emaciated hand groped blindly inside the carriage, until the woman shoved the three crystal vials into it. The bony fingers clenched around their prize, then slowly withdrew. The woman’s hand had just barely touched the rummaging claw, and Druin couldn’t help noticing the look of disgust on her face as she wiped her fingers against her jerkin.

Through the window shade came the unmistakable sound of someone drinking.

After entirely too long, the driver’s voice was heard again, calling out to his team. The carriage lurched, and they rattled again over the boggy landscape. Opposite Malcolm, the woman relaxed back into her seat.

“There,” she said, clearly satisfied. “That was easy, wasn’t it?”

Druin and Malcolm bid farewell to their traveling companion at the village of Rooks’ Court, a meager settlement struggling to maintain its existence amid the ruins of what had clearly once been a vast castle. Stones from the ancient foundations had been utilized in the construction of the few buildings, an economization which did nothing to improve their ramshackle appearance.

“You shouldn’t encounter any trouble between here and the Whetstone Pass,” the thin woman assured them, as she buckled her sword around her waist. “You’ve already passed through the Weeping Mire, and the next really bad stretch is beyond the Pass, in the crags. Do you know where you’re going from Whetstone?”

“Not a clue,” Druin confessed.

“Well good fortune to you in any case. I’m off to take care of some ghouls.”

Druin considered the view of Rooks’ Court. He could well imagine that the miserable little town was plagued by any manner of horror.

Even Malcolm clucked sympathetically. “A grim task, lady knight” he agreed. “Thou art valiant to assist these poor villagers against the terrors of the undead.”

The thin woman arched an eyebrow. “I think you misunderstand. The villagers
are
the ghouls. I’m here to help them.”

Druin blanched. “Against what?”

She shrugged. “Something worse.” And with that, she waved her hand in farewell and turned towards the hamlet.

Druin watched her go. Now that he looked carefully, it seemed that the nearest villagers -- still mercifully distant -- had a greenish complexion. “Have I mentioned,” he asked rhetorically, “how
wrong
this place is?”

The coachman above their heads whistled to his team, and they rattled on. They remained silent for several minutes, as the weed-choked fens gave way to boulder-strewn foothills.

Druin fidgeted with the velvet window shade. “I mean, ghouls. Ick.”

More minutes passed, the coach now tilting noticeably as it rattled further up into the bluffs.

“Ghouls. They eat dead people. Or they are dead people. I’m not exactly sure.”

Malcolm remained mute, staring resolutely out the window.

They continued to climb.

“Hard to tell the bad guys around here without a dance card. I wonder what kind of trouble ghouls would-“

“My mom has cancer,” said Malcolm quietly.

Druin shut his mouth abruptly. He opened it again, then thought better of it.

“Ewing’s Sarcoma. It’s a bone cancer. It started in her pelvis, they think, but they didn’t diagnose it for over a year. Now she has little cancer nodes, tumors, all through her ribcage and across the muscle walls of her chest.”

Malcolm spoke so softly that Druin had trouble hearing him over the rattle of the coach wheels. “They’re starting radiotherapy and chemo, but they think it probably already spread to her muscles and organs.”

Malcolm was silent for a moment. “Soft tissues,” he said finally. “The doctors call them soft tissues.”

Druin squirmed uncomfortably. “I’m sorry.”

Malcolm shrugged. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault, and my mom doesn’t really seem to care. She’s got a lot of faith in doctors, she says. Something about how they helped her dad.”

“Did your grandfather get cancer?”

“No, he went crazy.”

“But doctors cured him?”

“Died in a mental hospital. But he was getting treatment.”

Druin digested this. “Oh,” he said in a small voice. Something more seemed to be called for, but Malcolm had lapsed back into silence, staring out the window at the increasingly rocky landscape.

“So,” he hazarded at last, “you’re kind of retreating here? Gaming to get away from the situation? I totally sympathize, Malcolm, and I’m sorry I was ruining it for you last night. I know what you mean, I mean my mom doesn’t have cancer, but my parents are completely—“

“You don’t understand anything!” Malcolm hissed, face still rigidly averted. “I
hate
this crap. My parents have been into this dragons and dungeons garbage since they were in high school! They run a god-damned comic-book shop. My mom plays god-damned folk music at the god-damned coffee shop downstairs on Friday nights. My dad still plays games on the weekends with god-damned teenagers with god-damned dice!”

He turned, and Druin could see the ruined look on his face now. Obscurely, it occurred to him that no-one at the gaming company had thought of a way to detect and render tears yet. Not that he needed to see them, given the raw scrape of Malcolm’s voice.

“Their house is filled with stuffed dragons, and posters from science-fiction movies, and I grew up watching them waste all their time on this fantasy crap, and I swore to god I was going to get the hell out of it. I went to Harvard business school, full scholarship, and got my MBA in just five years.
Nobody
gets their degree in five years! And I work for the biggest god-damned import and exchange corporation in New York City, and my mom is dying of god-damned cancer and acting like she really doesn’t mind, and I realized I don’t know
anything
about her.”

Malcolm breathed deeply, twice, and released the air in a strangled gasp. He closed his eyes, calming himself, and sighed.

“I’m trying to find out why she doesn’t care. I want to know her before...if she...I don’t know.”

Druin reached for a comforting platitude and couldn’t find one. “I don’t know either. That sounds rough. I mean it is rough. Damn.”

They were both silent for a time. When Malcolm spoke, he seemed worn out. “I told her about this, and I thought she’d be thrilled, you know? Thought she’d want to hear all about this knightly adventure crap, maybe give her some connection, share something, I don’t know. You know what? She said ‘that’s nice – but how do
you
like it?’ Like it was a really big deal.”

He laughed, bitterly. They were silent again for a time.

Finally, Druin asked, “Well...how
do
you like it?”

Malcolm was silent for a time. “I really don’t know,” he admitted at last. “It’s exciting, like a good movie, I guess. But I don’t see how people lose their lives in these things. I’ve really been trying to, and I just don’t understand.”

“Does that mean you’re going to lose the ‘Thou’ and ‘Forsooth’ stuff?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No, I’ve gotten used to it.”

Malcolm chuckled, honestly this time. “Verily, then, must I maintain my courtly manner. ‘Twould ill suit a true knight to distress his allies.”

“Whetstone Pass!” interrupted the coachman’s shout from above. “All out for Whetstone Pass, The Ember Waste, and points South! This carriage continuing on to the Sheer Crag in ten minutes.” The coach lurched to a halt.

Druin and Malcolm disembarked, checking twice to make certain they had forgotten none of their precious few belongings. From the looks of things, it might be hard to find replacements in this vicinity.

The Whetstone Pass was surrounded by mountains on three sides. To the West, the road lurched its way down through the foothills, and eventually back to the bogs, Hasport, and the ocean. To the north and south, cliffs and peaks of forbidding gray pierced the sky in a jagged column reaching to the horizons. The only visible gap in their line was a single wedge of sky due East, defined by near-vertical rock faces. The road threaded its way through this narrow breach.