Massively Multiplayer (14 page)

“Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, noble warrior,” Malcolm intoned loudly. “A virtuous soul, fallen in the struggle against evil!” Half the patrons looked bewildered or vaguely concerned. The other half smothered giggles. One of them clapped.

And kept clapping. Slap. Slap. Slap. If it was possible for hands to express ironic amusement, then these were doing it. In one of those cinematically perfect moments with which everyone is sometimes blessed, or cursed, the crowd parted and Druin could clearly see the figure seated lazily by the window facing the port.

It was MadHarp.

He started to say something but choked it down into a gasp. Whatever he said would undoubtedly make the situation worse. With MadHarp, it always did.

“Yes, yes, I know,” the assassin said softly, arising with sinuous precision. “How did I get here before you did? You don’t think Gil could pay a ranking member of the Mage Tower for a teleportation spell? I was sent to check that you got the neophytes here safely. You made good time. Let’s see what that cost you.” He paused, one finger upraised and ostentatiously counted. “One. Two. Three. Three. Three. Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?” He grinned widely. “Where’s the rifleman, Dru?”

“What are you doing here?” Druin managed with a steady voice.

“You remember when Gil said that you’d be meeting a contact in Heron Rock who would direct you to the...area of interest? I’m it. Just to remind you of our little contract. Let’s see...you’ve cost us a client. That means you’ll be doing our little scouting mission for free, and you’ve just lost your backing-out clause. You owe us. I know we’ve registered with Justice, but we wanted to make sure you were crystal clear. I’m here to make sure you don’t get cold feet.”

I’ll just bet you are, Druin thought.

“Well, no use stand about lamenting the fallen,” MadHarp said, with a smirk at Sir Malcolm. “You get some sleep, Dru’. You’re going to need it. I’ll be making a report to Gil, and I’m sure he’s going to want me to make the next leg of your trip extra special, particularly when he hears you already fragged one of his clients. I’ll see you on the pier at three tomorrow. Sleep tight.” With a final sneer over his shoulder, he preceded the others up the stairs.

The three beginners watched him go in silence, then turned to Druin. “That was incredibly lame,” Rud opined. “Wandering into the Drear Wood was our fault. Heck, you saved the rest of us from taking a dirt nap with Killian. We should talk to Gil, let him know it wasn’t your fault.” Jenna and Malcolm nodded emphatically.

“Don’t bother,” Druin said, looking ill. “I’m sure if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. I bet there was something – or someone – up the Coppertown road. Just pure dumb luck that we stumbled onto that weird shortcut and still got cut down.”

“But it was an accident...”

Druin shook his head. “No way Gil sent MadHarp all the way over here for giggles. He was waiting to report back on how badly I’d biffed it. It was a set up. Gil’s got an old grudge. Looks like he’s finally calling it in.”

Rud and Jenna exchanged a worried glance. Rud opened his mouth to speak, but Druin raised a hand to silence him. “It wouldn’t make any difference at this point. You were a convenient excuse to draw me out. I’m tired. I’m logging out. You know when I’ll be back, if any of you want any more pointers.”

Or, he mentally added, if you want to see what happens when MadHarp gets the go-ahead to string me up in the town square.

Chapter Eight - Bingo

A good night’s sleep can put a better face on almost any bad situation. Of course, if the situation is bad enough, there is no way to actually achieve a “good” night’s sleep, so the saying is subject to self-fulfilling prophecy. For Andrew, who had to face his parents with the knowledge that no, he had not gone over the list of summer internships they had so helpfully culled from the net for him, and that no, he still hadn’t applied for post-graduate work, offering only the meager excuse that he was still a junior, the night was a rough one from the beginning.

Given his additional anxiety about what Gil and MadHarp had planned for him, anxieties he could share with no-one in his house, there seemed little to do throughout the night but rise every hour or two and check the nets to see whether anyone had reported any inter-area zone expansions related to the new update, similar to the one which had disrupted his escort duties. Hints were scattered throughout dozens of gaming sites, but were effectively buried in the abundant reviews of the new update. Strangely, he was uncheered to find that Crucible 4.0 had brought “previously unimaginable synaesthesia” to real-time gaming netivornments when he knew that MadHarp intended him to experience the system’s new joys from the bottom of Heron Rock’s harbor.

A sleepless night gave way to a wretched day. Heat in the nineties confined Andrew and Sara to the house, which might not have been so bad had their parents not warned them that they were expecting a crucial meeting at an unexpected time, and that they would therefore require near-absolute silence throughout the day. The net result was a predictable flare of temper which left Sara huffily (although quietly) complaining to her friends from the port in her room, and Andrew with a complex mixture of remorse and annoyance. The latter was not alleviated by the knowledge that Sara had insulted him using no less than three words he couldn’t even define.

Andrew gave up and consulted an online reference, which led to the most desperate of summertime activities, actual review of school materials in anticipation of the upcoming term. Business law hadn’t been his most challenging class, but it had sparked the most interesting discussions the previous year, and he spent some hours exploring a study module which offered him hypothetical legal battles and asked him to justify executive decisions. Mindful of Sara’s comments at the mall, he wondered whether there might be a career goal or something else with which to mollify his parents lurking in the course material.

Two hours and forty-five minutes later, he had been disabused of that notion. His simulated company lay in financial ruins, reeling from a half dozen summary judgments. Maybe he could start a list of careers he apparently wasn’t suited for, and come to some notion of his future by process of elimination.

His computer’s pre-arranged timer went off, reminding him of the imminent doom awaiting him in-game. He regarded it as a blessed relief. Gingerly he suspended the study module and drifted through his main interface, reaching out for the gossamer bubble which would take him back to the world where his troubles were, if artificial, at least temporarily more comprehensible than his real ones. Compared to facing his future, decapitation was beginning to look downright appealing.

Welcome to Crucible v 4.0. Druin the Thief. Circle: 6. Wealth: 1,449

The taproom of the Mermaid’s Ruin was even drearier the second time around, courtesy of a thick fogbank which turned the already weak sunlight pearlescent, and which muffled the sounds of gulls and creaking ships’ timbers. Druin was impressed at the effect until he remembered that he’d probably be appreciating it in several pieces before long.

“Nice, isn’t it?” one of the patrons near the door muttered, as the mist pooled around his boots. “I live in Seattle in RL. I log in to get away from this crap. ‘True volumetric atmospherics’ my foot.”

“Could be worse,” Druin said.

“How?”

“Could be going out to get your head chopped off, like me.”

The patron pondered this one for a while. “They say they’ve improved the hydrodynamics, too. I wonder what the splatter pattern will look like.” He perked up. “Hey, can I watch?”

Druin shook his head and stomped out into the cold.

MadHarp was waiting for him at the pier, leaning against a disintegrating piling and juggling a knife in a display of menace so calculated that for once Druin found the effect more irritating than threatening. “Alright, here I am. So where’s this mysterious Quest zone Gil has his heart set on?”

“My, my, aren’t we bold this morning. Someone dose your cornflakes with testosterone, Dru?” MadHarp grinned. “You know, I could just send you back to Bitter Edge in a box. Or several boxes.”

“If Gil had told you to, I wouldn’t have made it to the pier,” Druin retorted, realizing even as he spoke that it was the truth. He couldn’t keep from patting the hidden knife pockets on his sleeves, however. MadHarp was unpredictable at best.

Today, however, the assassin seemed to be in a rare good mood. “Now
that’s
the spirit! If you’d shown a little more of that back in the Chill Swamp, you wouldn’t be in this mess, would you? As it happens, I’ve just finished arranging passage for you with an ally of Gil’s. You leave now.”

“Passage? How far is this place, anyway? And who’s the ‘ally?’”

“That would be me.”

Druin turned to confront the speaker. He had to look up. And up some more.

The man was built like the wharf itself: massive, solid, rugged, slightly gone to seed, and probably ripe with the stench of the ocean. What little of his craggy face was visible beneath his bushy ginger beard was shadowed by an enormous black three-cornered hat. The red greatcoat draping his massive form couldn’t quite hide arms as thick as the pier’s pilings, or the hint of steel buried deep in a wide black belt with a golden buckle in the shape of an anchor. Black knee-high boots with rolled tops completed an effect that was like every pirate cliché in cinematic history, tossed into a blender and poured into a seven-foot frame.

The imposing figure stuck out a hand like a block of wood. “Cap’n Tom Thunder, Master and commander o’ the
August Rose
, at yer’ service,” he offered, in a gravelly voice.

“Uh, Druin Reaver. At yours.”

“So, ‘Harp, this one all, this trip?”

“Yes,” MadHarp confirmed with a nod. “The same schedule as last time. Drop him, give it two hours, don’t bother picking up the corpse. You know the drill.”

“Corpse?” Druin asked.

Captain Thunder scowled, a maneuver which rendered his face even more craggy, if possible. “Don’t take that tone with me, ‘Harp. I got an understanding with Gil, but there’s nothing in it says I can’t toss you overboard for chum in the meantime.”

“Corpse?”

“You can try,” MadHarp hissed, his knuckles clenching visibly on the knife hilt he still grasped.

Nervously, Druin noted with no small degree of wonder. This guy actually made MadHarp nervous. “Corpse?” he whispered.

The Captain turned his back on the assassin with a dismissive gesture, then motioned Druin further down the pier. “Well, time and tide, I always says. Get a move on, there, the ‘Rose is the tall one with two masts on the end.”

“Hold on just a second,” Druin protested. “Nobody said anything about an island. What island? And what corpse was that?”

The Captain raised his eyebrows in surprise, then swiveled back on MadHarp. “You ain’t told him? This ain’t one o’ Gil’s regular stooges?”

MadHarp grinned nastily. “He’s a volunteer, Thunder. That’s all you need to know. He’s been paid already, and so have you.”

The Captain looked ready to dispute the matter, and Druin was wondering whether it would be safer to avoid the fight by jumping into the harbor, when they were interrupted by the pounding of feet approaching at a run.

“Hold that boat! Druin, we’re coming with you!”

To Druin’s astonishment, Jenna came pounding up the pier, trailed by Malcolm who was happily hooting a battlecry of some kind. Jenna had found a staff somewhere, which threatened to trip her up with each headlong step she took.

“Hold it, hold it! Druin, we’re coming too. We talked about it last night after you logged out. Rud already got picked up by some other group, but Malcolm and I figured, well, we figured...uh...”

“In troth, by no means might we abandon our stalwart comrade in his dire need,” Malcolm supplied. “We couldst not help but overhear when the honorable Lord de Wraithmorte laid upon you this geas, to explore and make known to all new lands rich for adventure, and thusly hied we unto – “

“No, no, absolutely not!” MadHarp spun back to drive a finger into Druin’s chest. “
You
are the one who got us hosed in the Chill Swamp, you are the one who already lost us a quarter of this commission, and they are not –“

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Druin protested, “I didn’t ask them to.”

“He didn’t ask us to,” Jenna confirmed.

“So what are you guys doing here?”

“We’re volunteers.”

“Volunteers, eh?” Captain Tom Thunder grumbled. Jenna and Malcolm turned as if noticing the massive seaman for the first time. “Seems to me I heard a bit about ‘volunteers’ recently. Eh MadHarp? Seems to me you ain’t got no reason to stop ‘em.” He grinned broadly, apparently just for the sheer joy of seeing MadHarp squirm.

“Your deal with Gil is exclusive,” the assassin hissed, baring his teeth.

“Our deal for rights o’ transport, certainly,” Captain Thunder agreed. “But nobody says what I can do on my ship. You two,” he gestured at Jenna and Malcolm, “follow this ‘un aboard.”

“You’re going to hear about this, Captain” MadHarp promised.

“I don’t doubt it,” Thunder grinned, and strode into the mist towards his waiting vessel.

“Logout!”

MadHarp the Bard. Circle: 10. Wealth: 17,582. You have been logged in for 43 minutes. Thank you for playing Crucible v4.0.

Captain Matteo Herrera tore the goggles from his face and threw them at the stiff canvas wall of the communications tent, then savagely wrenched the bands from his wrists and ankles. The sound of ripping velcro reminded him to slow down and stow the computer gear properly in its shock-proofed case. Other than that noise, he moved silently and efficiently, both because he was an excellent soldier and because he had no interest in waking anyone else in the encampment. The ability to act alone was a valuable asset in Herrera’s line of work, but all the soldiers in his platoon knew that for him it went beyond professional discipline and out into the downright antisocial. Captain Herrera didn’t like people very much. He liked efficiency, he praised excellent work, he could even smile and joke with his men at appropriate times. But the smile never reached his eyes, and he never sought out anyone’s company.