The Clan (31 page)

I wrinkled my forehead trying to grasp the enormity of what he'd just told me and all the potential scenarios it implied. I needed to decide what to do with the whole nursery. "But what about their names and stats? How did they manage to create their characters? And how are they going to choose their skills if none of them can even read yet?"

""Well, Sasha over there can. And Jana knows the alphabet and can count to ten."

My face must have turned crimson because he gave me a reconciling smile. "Calm down. Our admin has tweaked the settings allowing us to control the capsules remotely. I sat at the server computer helping them to generate their characters. I trusted my hunches to choose their classes. I chose the human race to limit any psychological discomfort. I deposited their characteristic points into endowment accounts until they reached level 100. By then, they will all learn to read."

I shook my head in confusion. "What endowment accounts? There was no such option available when I created my character."

He shrugged:
lots of things that weren't available then are available now
.

I rummaged through Wiki looking for the answer to this rather vital question. I quickly located the section I needed and started reading. And once I'd read enough, I couldn't help swearing.

For some reason, the AlterWorld admins had limited the number of upgrades to a bare minimum and switched their focus to non-gaming initiatives: things like offline activities, gaming merchandise or more initial character-generating options. The bank service mentioned by Doc fell into the latter category and was now aggressively marketed as a hardcore pro option for those who've outgrown standard gaming challenges and were quite prepared to put their balls on the table today for a vague promise of potential future bonuses.

Now they could save some of their characteristic points and store them in a bank until reaching the level of their choice. The level number was the actual percentage bonus. For instance, if you banked 10 points for the duration of 20 levels, you earned yourself +20%, pocketing 24 points. Not much but still. Naturally, it made starting off that much more difficult so a money injection was a must. But he'd blocked all their points till level 100!

"Doc, tell me you only banked the starting 25 points."

He shook his head. A bad premonition clutched at my heart.

"All of them, level 1 to 100. Call it a junior savings account, if you want. I ran a simulation, and the dividends were mind-blowing. And most importantly, it'll prevent the kids from making stupid mistakes like investing everything they have in useless agility."

I groaned. A hundred levels without any growth! Potentially, it gave them a monumental advantage: about 350 free points to play with. But how were you even supposed to ever get to them? You could easily get stuck for life somewhere at level 30. It was too obvious the Admins had come up with a nifty way to milk millionaire players forcing them to inject real money simply to keep their handicapped chars in game.

One of the kids waddled toward us. He had the most piercing blue eyes. "Doctor, can I have a puppy too? Sasha won't share his with me."

Doc nodded, pointing at the Temple doors. "Go through that big gate over there past the big toothy men with spears. Inside there'll be a big bald doggie. Ask her to give you a puppy."

The boy waddled off. I knitted my brows in disbelief. "She won't!"

"Oh, yes. The Hounds are all emos. They don't sense any threat in the children. I believe they view them as puppies."

Still, I had my doubts. "I'd rather we went there and kept an eye on them. I don't want the Hell Hound to scare the boy into becoming the first virtual stutterer."

He shrugged. "Go ahead, then. I have to admit I'm afraid of them myself. When they see me
—the Hounds I mean—they start shaking. They line up and bare their teeth at me. They can probably sense all those thousands of graves behind my back."

His gaze glazed over. Stooping, he stared into space. I had to shake him back to life before it was too late.

"Doc, wake up! What's wrong with you, man? You've finally got the chance to save a good dozen kids! This isn't a hospice any more! This is somewhere totally different!"

He seemed to have bucked up a bit. His eyes brightened up. Reaching out, he caught a tiny girl running past, her clothes generic, her eyes beaming with joy. He tousled her hair and let her go. Laughing happily, the little mite ran off to chase a butterfly. The children seemed to be perking up. Their voices grew louder, their laughter more frequent.

"Okay, Doc. Yours is a holy cause. I'll do what I can to help you."

He shrugged. "You will, no question about that. Accept them into your clan, enter them onto your books and let's start raising them. If this year we manage to digitize two or three hundred, then my life is complete. No matter how long I live, I'll never do something as good as this.

I shrank back. "Doc, what are you saying? What clan? These are Dead Lands! This is the Valley of Fear, not some Little Lambs Nursery! These children need saving, I agree. But we need to do it collectively, all of us—not drag this millstone all by ourselves! We could buy a house in the city or introduce some kind of non-mandatory tax for the clans."

Doc forced a smile. "Did
n't you say that this was the safest place for your clan members? Go ahead, then, grow the new generation of AlterWorld denizens. My wife will soon move here permanently to join our daughter and her friend. I'm laying the groundwork now with some of the parents. I'm sure that after the initial shock of losing their child, then realizing that it's alive and well even if unreachable, many of them will be able to understand and help us. Some financially, others might go digital themselves.

"Doc!" I groaned. "In another three months this place may be sheer hell. It's war we're looking at!"

He stared at me, uncomprehending. "Who would dare attack a children's home? On the contrary: they're the best guarantee of the castle's safety."

I shook my head.
"What planet are you from? When did it stop big kids from trampling the little ones' sand castles when they ran around playing at war? Also, I'm not some scumbag to hide behind toddlers' backs."

Lena came out of the Temple gates leading the boy who was already clutching a puppy to his chest. She clapped her hands, attracting the others' attention,

"Children! Who wants to feed the baby dragons with me?"

Screams of joy and a for
est of raised hands. She smiled. "Then we'll go now to that big heap of purple scrap metal and each of you may take a tiny piece. Baby dragons love it. Then we'll all line up and march on to feed Draky and Craky."

I couldn't take it much longer. "Lena! Stop wasting mithril. Can't they just eat some normal metal, there's plenty lying around?"

She shook her head sternly. "Steel gives them colic. What difference does it make, anyway? It's either us or Vertebra brings them a whole tank turret again."

I clutched at my heart. "Which Vertebra? Which tank?"

"The big dragon, I mean. She's a Bone Dragon, isn't she? So I called her Vertebra. The tank—well, I don't know much about them. She brought them this turret with two really delicate guns. It's really nice... was. Vertebra says mithril is very good for them. They're at that age when their bones and scales are forming. They grow them out of whatever they eat. Vertebra said they're going to be the first mithril dragons in the world, imagine!"

Oh
, no. Some people had rats in their grain barns. I had dragons. What the hell was going on?

Lena clapped her hands again, "Attention, everybody! In a moment, you will see a small square window right in front of your eyes. In it, you'll see two buttons. You must will yourself really hard to press the one that's on the left. Everyone remember where your left hand is? That's right! Are you ready? Press it!"

I was watching, slightly dumbfounded, as system messages flashed before my eyes,

Alexandra Kovaleva, Level 1 Druid, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!

Jana Novac, level 1 Cleric, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!

Sergey Tischenko, level 1 Warrior, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!

Chapter Twenty-
Three

T
heir heartrending voices had long died away but my lips were still moving as I repeated Doc's last phrase,

"Who if not us?"

 A very uncomfortable question, once again raising the subject of responsibility. Instead of playing and having fun, I kept sinking deeper into local problems, lugging the load of other people's hopes and struggling in a net of responsibilities that hadn't been mine to accept.

Of course I understood Doc, at his wits' end with frustration, overwhelmed by the never-ending chain of deaths. He was like a cat saving her kittens out of a burning house: her hair smoldering, her eyes swollen with blisters, diving back into the flames time and time again to pull out her wailing babies one at a time. Doc, too: once he'd seen a ray of hope in the dark, he followed it, throwing caution to the wind, selling his apartment, exposing himself to blows from all quarters, all to pull his babies out: not so much
where to
, but more importantly,
where from
.

How could I not understand him? How could I have said no? True, he hadn't warned me; he hadn't asked for my advice. Probably, in the light of his objective it all seemed petty and irrelevant. Like a lip-biting kamikaze pilot pointing his plane at the deck of an enemy aircraft carrier, he saw no problems, only his goal and his duty. In his mind he was already there, burning alive on the mangled deck amid crumpled metal, taking hundreds of enemies and their powerful machine with him.

I had no idea how it was going to work out with the children. In case of war, we could always move them somewhere safe—say, to the Vets to begin with. No human being would object to offering shelter to a child in danger. Besides, they wouldn't have to walk the war's endless roads as refugees. Here, reaching safe areas was as easy as activating a teleport. Wish we had this skill back in 1941 when millions of people had perished in blockades and ambushes. The siege of Leningrad alone had cost us way too dearly...

In principle, given another ten to fifteen years, these kids who knew no other home but the world of sword and sorcery could become its strongest warriors. They would have no inkling that it was all a game. They'd have no doubt that magic is real, invisibility is normal and healing someone is as easy as waving your hand over them. They would be the ones to invent new spells and bring magic under control. There had to be a difference, making knights and wizards out of thirty-year-old office rats and housewives or raising them from two-year-old toddlers. Which of them would I bet on in the long run? Quite possibly, he with enough intuition to foresee this trend now and take the young wolf cubs under his wing could be looking at a considerable jackpot sometime in the future.

Still, I had to do something about Lena. This was a classic case of cognitive dissonance causing me to expect more from her: more responsibility, more help and more maturity. I kept forgetting about the barely teenage girl locked inside that voluptuous adult body, her hormones raging (if that were at all possible here). So I really had to put my foot down before she derailed us all. And seeing as we had a kindergarten in the making, it would be a good idea to introduce a similar hierarchy in the clan itself: we'd have a junior group, a senior group, pre-school, primary school and so on.

I spent a few more minutes distributing some basic rights between the groups, making sure that senior clan members had a few more options than the younger ones. With a vindictive grin, I removed Lena from the clan officers' list and moved her to a new group,
Junior High
. After a moment's thought, I added one final touch. Poking out the tip of my tongue with zeal and satisfaction, I wrote:
Valley of Fear Junior High
. Now, baby, you'd have to prove to me you merited a promotion! Best regards.

Excellent. I slapped my knees and jumped to my feet, scaring a butterfly and earning a disapproving glance from the Hound pup busy hunting it.

Enough digressing. I reminded myself of a steam engine pulling an enormous freight train packed with goods and people clinging to car roofs as I dragged it directly into the financial abyss. I had to force myself out of it. Actually, that was exactly what I'd been doing those last few days. The cigarette business wasn't bringing in any profits yet: all the proceeds were immediately invested into its development, building premises, buying supplies and hiring more staff. Judging by what my analysts had gleaned from my business plan, in just one year we were looking at five hundred grand gold a month to each alliance member. Nice as it was, I needed money now—preferably fifty times that.

I started by creating a new High Spell scroll, put it up at a private auction, then sent an invitation to the Minediggers impatiently waiting for it. In less than ten minutes, they bought the precious parchment. True to their word, they transferred the million into my account adding a polite letter where their ill-concealed impatience and hopes for quick revenge shone through their words of gratitude. I had a funny feeling they weren't going to stop at that. They would keep going, destroying the greedy offenders' castles one after another. They were yet to learn that sooner or later
—sooner rather than later—their happy bubble would burst. Everybody in the square had witnessed the scroll in action. All the interested parties had gleaned everything they needed from that demonstration and were probably busy working on countermeasures. Which were quite simple and obvious. It was enough to break the dome down into a few smaller segments or levels. Then the scroll would only be able to remove the first layer, presenting the attackers with an unpleasant surprise: a second protective sphere.

I was afraid that very soon, when discussing a castle's defense levels, everyone would allude to the number of layers in a dome. The scrolls would still be used but their price would fall tenfold, if not hundredfold.

Too bad. I had to squeeze as much out of it as I could while I still could. I had to churn out a scroll a day: the Vets' arsenal could wait no matter how many hints Dan and the General would drop.

Another money-making idea had been burning a hole in my brain for the last twenty-four hours, ever since I'd received Thror's message. That honorable Dwarf, the patriarch of Thror's Gem House, informed me that the work on both altars had been completed. Which made me remember our last meeting and the way he complained of the greedy priests of Light who didn't want to add a new god to their pantheon
—one that would answer the needs of both Dwarfs and miscellaneous crafters. Actually, he'd chosen the right shoulder to cry on. Was I the First Priest or just a pretty face? Granted, I only knew the location of one Dark temple out of the remaining four: the one in the Drow capital. But that was plenty to summon a new patron god. Ruata, the Drow Princess doubling as the deserted temple's Priestess, was unlikely to mind. And even if she did, so what?

In other words, I had enough to offer the midgets from Under the Mountain to make them untie their purse strings and dig up their grandfathers' pots of gold. The unique service of custom-summoning a patron god was going to cost them.

A couple of hours later, having rummaged through the available gods lists and having discovered, to my joy, an additional box saying
include deities from literature, fantasy and gaming,
I was knocking at the massive gate of Thror's Gem House with my most enticing smile.

The clan's patriarch knew better than to make me wait. Almost straight away, the receptionist invited me in. He wasn't particularly pleased with the speed with which I accepted my finished order
—apparently, he'd been looking forward to explaining every flourish of the intricate design and painting a picture of the task's inconceivable difficulty. Now he sniffed into his beard, apparently betrayed in his best expectations.

Unwilling to alienate him,
I hurried to rectify my mistake. "You'll have to excuse my haste, Sir. I didn't want to hurt your feelings by inspecting your perfect work for non-existent faults. The stamp of your House is all I need to justify its quality."

My sugar-coated flattery had the desired effect. The dwarf relaxed, accepting a stance of haughty arrogance. Oh well, end of fine tuning, time to engage the primary caliber.

"Besides, I wanted to save our time and energy for a much more important private conversation," I rolled my eyes meaningfully at the guards behind their firing slits.

The Patriarch gave a kingly nod and began making a complex sign combination with his fingers. Steel trapdoors clanged. The Dwarf's time-ridden face expressed a patiently polite attention with just a tad of skepticism.

"
Absolutely
private," I repeated.

He stared at me with suspicion, chewing his lower lip. Finally, he made up his mind. He made another sign, dramatically more complex than the first one, and froze, listening. Then he made another sign and finally shook his fist at somebody unseen. Another doortrap clanged
—hopefully, the last one.

The Patriarch looked up at me
from under his bushy eyebrows. "Speak."

"Does the name of Aulë say something to you?"

Crack! A steel pencil in the dwarf's hand snapped in half. With a thump, one of the guards collapsed behind the wall. So he should. The blacksmith god, the lord of earth and metals and the Maker of the Dwarven race who'd passed onto them his love of creations in metal and stone.

"Speak," the Patriarch repeated. He leaned forward, virtually lying with his chest on the table, his hope
ful eyes looking into mine.

Four hours l
ater I walked out of his house, not quite stable on my feet due to the amounts of Dwarven Extra Dry consumed, and breathed a sigh of relief. It probably would have been easier to come to a business agreement with an electric kettle than with those skinflints from Under the Mountain. They hadn't given me twenty million. Nor ten. I'd only managed to squeeze seven out of them. Plus five hundred Dwarves deployed for the restoration of the castle's defensive capacity including four external bastions.

And if someone says it's not enough, then I hope they have to deal with a dwarf vendor in every scruffy shop they ever visit on their crooked life's path
. And if six months of such pain in the butt doesn't turn him into a gibbering walking skeleton gray before his time—then I'll eat humble pie and admit I was taken for a ride. But at the moment, I was entirely proud of the deal I'd just struck.

According to the Dwarves, they could have seven million in a week in exchange for my keeping my end of the bargain: summoning their much-anticipated deity. Actually, without even mentioning anything else, such summoning would bring thousands of Dwarves under the Fallen One's banners. True that whenever the question was raised, Honorable Thror had turned rather pale and sad
—so it looked as if the event could lead to a rift in the Dwarven ranks. Not everyone was prepared to denounce their new gods returning to their original element that technically had found itself on the side of the Dark.

But for me personally, such a Dwarven exodus from the army of Light and their allegiance to the Fallen One was in some respect even more important than the money itself. This was a very hefty weight added to the balance of future confrontation.

Having received a boost from the admittedly decent brew, my mind was already painting countless steely ranks of Dwarf squads lining up at the foot of the Temple, waiting for my command. Then the world shuddered.

Booom
, the gong reverberated all over AlterWorld with a system alert. I peered at the opened message and froze in the middle the road.

Pantheon alert! A new force has entered the world! Llos, the Dark Mother of the Drow, Weaver of Chaos and the Lady of Spiders, has joined the Pantheon of the Fallen One!

 A Drow Goddess? Still hopeful, I rummaged through the Altar menu only to confirm that the Dark Temple of the Original City had regained its patron deity. Ruata, you stupid woman, what was that now? How on earth could you have done the dirty on me?

I was like a taut string, unable to restrain my anger. What a cheek! Who did they all think they were? When I needed them to help me restore the First Temple and sort out the problems it had created
—no one seemed to be interested. They were all too busy lining up for the freebies! Not just lining up—they were taking the place apart, pilfering everything that wasn't screwed down! Destroying valuable ammunition, stashing away mithril and gobbling it down, even denying me my right to summon a patron god! The Temple's High Priestess was the only person who could have done it, and that's exactly what she did, jumping at her chance. Everyone was busy tugging the blanket while I was alone lying here freezing my butt off.

Sorry, guys. This isn't the way the cookie crumbles. I'd do whatever it takes
—excommunicate, anathemize, disembody whoever deserved it.

I found myself running on the cobbled pavement not really looking where I was going, colliding with unhurried players or ducking out of their way. They shouted at my back something about those Elven tykes who should all be put up against the castle wall or hanged on lampposts. I only smirked. Yeah,
no foreigners allowed
, wonder where I'd heard that before? Sorry, guys, bad timing, duels would have to wait.