Shadow Knight's Mate (3 page)

The Korean designer finished signing hastily, put a sign on his table that said in Chinese that he would return soon, and vaulted over the table without touching it. This was no mean feat, since when he landed in front of Jack it became clear that Jack, at 6'2”, was nearly a foot taller. Chun beamed and gripped both Jack's arms. Jack bowed his head and then tried to stay slouched so they were closer to eye level.

“Jack Driscoll! I know you, though pictures of you are hard to come by.”

Jack nodded at the ring on Mickey's finger. “You've played
Back Alleys.”

Chun touched the ring on his t-shirt as if pledging allegiance. “Not just played it. It is my map of the world.”

“Really?” Jack looked puzzled. “But then—”

“I know.
Deadly Digits
was hardly in the same mold. But it was what was wanted from me. It was my way of breaking in.”

Back Alleys
had been Jack's failed game, the one that depended on strategy and cunning rather than violence. Chun's
Deadly Digits,
by contrast, had a body count akin to the Battle of Gettysburg.

Chun took Jack's arm and walked with him. They occupied a zone of their own amid the chaos of the convention. The gaming world was very odd. One could be the designer of a game that had sold millions, yet walk unrecognized even in a crowd of fans. This had many advantages, such as now.

On the other hand, if that man and woman who had been following Jack all morning closed in, he couldn't count on any help
from adoring fans. He felt a little safer, though, because Chun's bodyguards, two men dressed in jeans and white t-shirts, were also following them at a discreet distance. Chun's anxiety was well-known even beyond the gaming world. He was
North
Korean, a defector, and perpetually feared recapture.

But now Chun ignored his guards and everyone else at the convention, talking as enthusiastically as any newcomer to the gaming world, telling Jack about his experiences at the convention, his travels, how he had gotten started. Then he suddenly stopped, taking Jack's arm. “There is something I have wanted to ask you. On level 7, when you are in that alley in Helsinki and you pick up a stick to fend off your attackers, isn't that a violation of the no-weapons rule you've established?”

“Ah,” Jack said, “you've played the pirated edition.”

“No!”

“I'm 'fraid so. The pirates couldn't stand the lack of violence and slipped that one scene into the game.”

“This is horrible!”

Jack shrugged. Chun remained outraged on his behalf, looking around as if for a complaint desk. Jack laughed. “They stole it from me, Chun. Altering it for their own market seems a lesser sin by—”

“No.” Chun kept his hand on Jack's arm, looking sternly into his eyes. “If one is going to take a man's work, one must take it all, especially its principles. Anything else is an abomination.”

Jack laughed again. “You have a very refined sense of ethics.”

Jack was much less concerned with the years-ago theft of his intellectual property than with the fact that he could no longer see Chun's bodyguards. Amid the huge crowds in the convention center there were ebbs and flows of people, like waves. One of those tides had apparently swept over the bodyguards and pulled them out to sea. They could have just gotten momentarily separated from their principle, but Jack didn't think so.

He stood in the midst of all those people and felt isolated. No one else saw. No one would do anything. Where was security?
Earlier in the morning Jack had seen uniformed guards scattered regularly through the hall, but now saw none.

He and Chun walked on. The bodyguards did not reappear. Chun in his absorption with questioning Jack didn't seem to notice. Jack no longer saw the man and woman he thought had been following him, either, but didn't feel reassured.

“I thought perhaps picking up the stick in the alley was permissible under your rules because it was a found object, not meant as a weapon, and you didn't carry it with you.”

Jack shook his head. “No weapons, that was the rule. A stick is a weapon.”

“Ah.” Chun puzzled at the obstacle. “What if you defended yourself with a hatrack, then, that happened to be available? What about… a credit card?”

“Chun, you're going way deeper into this than the game will really support. The point of it was not to
get
attacked. Once you're attacked you've failed.”

“Ah,” Chun said again. He had amazing concentration, standing completely absorbed in thought in the middle of the chaotic scene. Jack, on the other hand, was looking all around them. He felt a trap tightening, though he still didn't see the people he'd thought were pursuing him.

Then he did—the woman, her blondeness distinctive in the crowd, flitting behind a booth.

“Chun?”

“Eh?”

“Where are your men?”

Chun turned very slowly, a complete three hundred and sixty degrees. The quality of his concentration changed abruptly. His features moved alertly. His hands clenched and unclenched. Chun was trim and well-muscled, but barely over five feet tall. Jack could see over his head.

“Sometimes you can't see them,” Chun said slowly of his bodyguards.

“That would be true if they were gone, too.”

“Come.”

Chun took Jack's elbow and guided him swiftly. Jack hoped his friend was looking for allies, but Chun just kept moving, turning from aisle to aisle, finally slipping through a relatively open space. On the other side, among a crowd of exhibits again, he said, “Two of them, yes? A man and a woman?”

Jack nodded. “Do you recognize them?”

Chun shook his head. “Only their purposefulness. Will you do me a favor, my friend?”

“Of course.”

“We are going to walk down that narrow aisle over there, back into the staging area where it's less crowded. I will walk in front. Your body and your coat should cover me. Just keep walking back that direction until you are in an area empty of people. All right?”

“Isn't there anybody you could call?” Jack asked. “Back-up? Bring on the next shift of bodyguards early?”

Chun smiled at his nervousness. “You are the next shift, Jack. Heaven sent you, I think. Come.”

He turned and walked, still as if strolling. Jack, following orders, walked almost directly behind him. Jack wore a long, lightweight overcoat, a variation on a style of dress still favored by some gamers, how many years after “The Matrix”? Chun seemed to compact himself even farther.

“It must be hard looking over your shoulder all the time like this. See people even when they're not there. Actually, though, it's a good mind-set for a game designer, if you think about it. Have you thought about coming up with a game based on your own situation?”

At some point, Jack realized he was talking to himself.

He hadn't had much time to formulate a plan when he'd felt followed, but now enlisting Chun seemed not to have been as brilliant as he'd thought. The little gamer was so beset by genuine dangers that he would bolt at a sign like this, as he had done. His bodyguards had proven useless, too. Jack continued to walk, armed now only with a cell phone, and no one he knew could reach him in time.

He passed a work table and quickly picked up a dowel rod, about an inch in diameter and two feet long. Jack slipped it up the sleeve of his coat. The rod was lightweight wood, but better than nothing.

At first he had heard rustling around him. Now that sound was gone, as was much of the noise of the convention. Curtains that closed off this backstage area absorbed much of it. There were the sounds of moving footsteps and murmuring voices, and Jack even saw a handful of people, but all flitting so fast they didn't seem to see him. He would have welcomed being challenged for a backstage pass and kicked out of here, but of course that didn't happen, since he wanted it.

He thought he heard the sound of a body falling, but that could have been only panic beginning to sing in his ears, painting its own scenario out of random noise.

He turned a corner and suddenly there was the woman, right in front of him. Tall, blonde, slender, with a thin face and dark eyes focused laserlike on Jack. She wore a white business suit, the legs of which tightly wrapped her own. It would be made of some fabric that allowed her to move fast. Her hands were out in front of her in what, for all Jack knew, was the killing position of lao-tze.

A person could have been caught in her gaze. Jack, though, immediately leaped to the side in the confined area. Sure enough, a foot shot through the space he had occupied a moment before. A bare foot in a blue pants leg. The man who'd been following Jack earlier had doffed his shoes and any pretense of being a member of the convention. When his kick missed its target he pivoted quickly, leg still upraised, bringing the same foot rapidly toward Jack's nose.

Six inches from its target, the foot hit the dowel rod Jack had slipped out of his sleeve. Jack cracked it smartly just where he had aimed, at the man's ankle bone. He heard the contact, like a well-hit line drive.

His attacker showed no response. His swinging foot missed Jack's face, but the attacker landed on that foot and immediately leaped off it, coming toward his target again.

“Oh, shit,” Jack said, scrambling back. He had always thought these impervious-to-pain players were cheats in a game world, and he'd never imagined encountering one in real life. That smash on the ankle bone would hurt like hell, he was sure of that, but the man wouldn't give into the pain until after this fight. After Jack was down and dead.

So Jack's dowel rod wasn't going to be much help, except to fend off attack, but now the other man would be ready for that. The attacker stood for just a moment looking at Jack with a flat, dull gaze. Jack wondered if this staring at the opponent was a new form of martial arts. This man didn't seem to be trying to hypnotize him. Maybe only to memorize him.

No, it was a distraction. Even while the eyes remained on Jack, the man's foot came at him again, this time directly upward. Jack stepped back and held the stick parallel to the ground, tightly in his two hands, hoping the foot would smash on it again. He held it perfectly positioned. The foot hit right in the middle of the stick.

And broke through it, hitting Jack in the chest. Jack fell backward, onto the ground, catching himself so his hands were down on the concrete floor. His opponent's eyes smiled. Jack would not be able to rise from that position, in this small space, without making himself vulnerable for all the time his opponent would need. Jack just sat for a moment, but that was dangerous too. The attacker's foot reached out and pulled Jack's foot forward, so that his legs were extended, making it even harder to rise and leaving Jack even more exposed. Then, his fastest move yet, the man pivoted on that foot and brought his other one around in a roundhouse kick Jack didn't even have time to fall back to avoid. He cringed, beginning to slide away from the blow, hoping to evade enough of its force to stay alive and barely conscious.

The swish of flesh past his face was so close that Jack could smell the dirt under the man's toenails. One of the nails, very short, sliced Jack's nose, opening a trail of fire. Jack screamed.

Then he leaped back and up to his feet. His opponent hadn't been toying with him. He'd been interrupted by problems of his
own.
A
problem, that is. Chun was back. He stood behind the attacker, having pulled him back just enough to keep his foot from connecting with Jack's head. Then he had dropped him. Chun stood there smiling slightly, hands up loosely in front of him, bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking a little ridiculous in his jeans and Mickey Mouse t-shirt and martial arts pose.

The man on the ground moved so fast he was airborne as he was turning, both his legs and hands aimed at Chun. He came at him like a rain of knives.

And Chun spun, closing momentarily through those arms and legs, inside the other man's defenses, where Chun cracked him in the nose with his elbow. There was a flurry of other moves on both parts, mostly defensive, Jack thought, and then the two fighters backed apart.

The attacker didn't shake off Chun's blow as he had Jack's. He appeared obviously dazed, blood spurting down from his nose, covering his mouth and chin. Chun began to move again.

The root of Chun's reputation in the martial-arts-gaming world, even before he'd designed a game, was that he had been North Korean and then southeast Asian karate champion three years in a row when he was eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. The digits in his
Deadly Digits
game were his own.

Jack had not struck up a conversation with him by random.

“Take the other one!” Chun yelled as he spun in to attack the man.

Jack turned to the woman, who had stayed back from the action. She looked panicked, he thought.

This lithe blonde martial arts woman was such a gaming convention. They were always turning up in the kinds of games Chun designed. In real life there were very few, and Jack didn't think whoever was following him had come up with one at short notice. The woman was just along as a distraction while the man came in for the kill. Jack gave her an appeasing look, as if to say,
Just don't do anything stupid and you'll get out of this okay.

And the woman spun on her heel and kicked him in the head.

“Unghh.” He had had just enough time to turn with the blow, slipping some of its force, but his head still rang. He jumped back, trying to gain time, and she rushed in to him. Jack still had half the broken stick in his hand, and he thrust it at her face like a knife, its jagged end capable of doing a lot of damage. She evaded it smoothly, though, twisting back and to the side, which gave Jack the opportunity to sweep his own leg behind hers and pull. This move didn't knock her down, just made her lose balance and stumble back. Jack didn't press his advantage, afraid she'd hit something vital the next time she closed with him.