The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) (3 page)

Bang
, the heavens boomed. No other ramifications followed. Cheering up, the god took my unfeeling hand palm up, laying the artifact in it. Now I could clearly see the Fallen One's logo of the streamlined yin and yang: the symbol of life's two eternally intertwined forces.

With a sympathetic glance in my direction, he mouthed a barely audible command. The coin glowed, heating up. My flesh hissed and began crackling, turning black, then scorching. My life bar promptly shrank. The god didn't let it drop too far, though, healing me as required, while I stared through the sickening whiff of barbeque smoke at the crimson-hot metal sinking into my open palm.

I rolled my eyes, calling him all the names under the sun but still grateful for the timely administered anesthesia. Finally the hissing subsided as our faces lost the crimson hue from the reflected flames. The Fallen One swept away the remaining whiffs of blue smoke and paused, studying my hand. He grunted, pleased, then touched his finger to my forehead, restoring sensitivity.

I rubbed my hands together, removing the caked crust from the already healthy pink skin surrounding the yin-and-yang-shaped scar. Then I gave the god a not-too-happy glare. "Where should I apply for the collar?"

"Which collar?"

"You know what I mean. White Winnie's got his already, now it's apparently my turn."

Bang
, a divine hand clipped me round the ear stripping me of 90% health. I stood up, forcing back an instinctive right hook to his jaw. No, punching your head god wasn't really kosher. Much better to sink an adamant blade under his seventh rib.

The Fallen One stared at me skeptically. "Feeling better?"

"A grudge always feels good," I refused to play along. "Why, what do you see that I don't?"

"Everything. White Winnie's is the mark of ownership. Of submission. Yours is the precious gift of a High God, and I risked a lot making it. That's nothing to turn your nose up at!"

"What did you risk, then?" I asked, calming down a bit and nodding my thanks to Macaria who'd just switched her attention from the puppies for long enough to fix my plummeting health.

The Fallen One thawed out a bit. He seemed to be genuinely proud of the work he'd just done and, like any craftsman, he couldn't wait to blow his own trumpet.

"You see, every our action is a tiny pebble that tips the scales of the universal balance. But as we two are in different classes, mine can be a boulder while yours is but a grain of sand. Mind you, it's quite capable of starting a landslide provided the place and the time are right. But that's irrelevant. So basically, by interfering so blatantly with the course of events, I disrupt this shaky balance which in turn not only offers the Gods of Light a perfect excuse to strike back but also exposes me to the universe's potential compensatory readjustment. And you can never tell how the cosmos is going to react. It's quite possible that a great leader of Light has just been born somewhere—or a mob slain by a Paladin of Light has just dropped an incredibly powerful scroll. You just can't tell."

He paused, his gaze focused on the horizon, his unmoving stare seeing things only known to himself. Well, well.

Finally he came to. "Actually, considering the Gods of Light's current advantage on all fronts, I'm not particularly worried about disrupting the world's balance. As it stands at the moment, it's a one-team one-way game, which at least allows us to restore some of the disadvantage. That's one explanation of our recent successes and our opponents' lack of response. No need to grin! Your particular persona doesn't interest the world's scales in the slightest. Don't get too big-headed: they'll brush you off the world's chess board without even noticing. There'll be no free ride. What's worse is that our actions bring this world to life, adding to its uniqueness, thus bringing the two realities—Earth and AlterWorld—even further apart. The umbilical cord that still connects them keeps stretching but it's getting thinner and tauter. It rings with the strain. Here, listen."

I pricked up my ears, struck by that unexpected bit of insider information. I could hear the wind blowing, the bees buzzing, the trees rustling. But was it the bees? Or the wind? I raised a quizzical eyebrow, looking him right in the eye. The god lowered his eyelids with a sad smile. A chill ran down my spine.

I shook my head as if trying to empty it, cartoon-like, of all the sounds and musical notes. The Fallen One had to be pulling my leg.

He promptly grinned and guffawed. You son of a bitch!

Once he calmed down, he turned serious. "In actual fact, you—all of you permas I mean—are yet to develop astral sensitivity. You can't notice the strain sustained by celestial spheres but it's huge, you'll have to trust me on that. Very soon the umbilical cord will break, rending the two worlds apart, probably never to see each other again. We can only guess what will happen to us afterward."

I wrinkled my forehead. "If, as you say, AlterWorld will drift away, it means that all the regular players will go offline, unable to re-enter the game, right? There're fifty million players and only two percent of them are permas. How's that for Judgment Day? Empty streets and castles, deserted chat rooms..."

"Not quite so," the Fallen One pointed out. "Your biggest mistake is believing it's still a game. It's not. This is a living breathing kicking world even if initially artificial. Your own faith created it which in turn was amplified by the Creator's will. The second is true. There're hardly one million perma players in this world but by the same token, you stay in game twenty-four seven and not three hours a day as the average player. Which is why at any given time permas make at least seven or eight—up to ten—percent of all players. Besides, don't forget the NPCs: there're ten of them per player and as you may have noticed, they're just as prone to the perma effect as is AlterWorld itself. Lloth and Ruata the Drow Princess—both are human enough, don't you think?"

I shuddered at the names. Oh yes, those two were human all right. Too human, in fact, considering their sadistic tendencies. I still suffered from the phantom pains in my dislocated joints. But it wasn't the Drow that worried me at the moment. I remembered the tired column of gnolls, dusty beyond all recognition, stumbling along the sunbaked road toward the depths of the Frontier. Refugees escaping human cruelty, the first ones in AlterWorld.

The Fallen One watched my face closely. "Ah, so you see it now," he nodded, satisfied. "This is your main advantage—part of your inner force. You're capable of thinking out of the box and acting on your hunches. Your immersion is unprecedented—you just don't see the difference between human players and NPCs. You share your faith generously with everyone the way a farmer casts his seeds over his field. Take the hounds, for instance. Or Harlequin the goblins' foreman, or Lurch the lonely castle AI—even Snowie the albino troll who was created solely as an ammo carrier. All of them have something to be grateful to you for. Keep up the good work, my friend. Make more allies among AlterWorld's native population: they are an enormous and as yet unclaimed force."

I nodded absent-mindedly as I went through my mental address book. The charismatic Gunnar—the vendor of all things brutal; the Bone Dragon with her voracious chicks; the cutthroats trusty as steel—I'd have loved to have seen them join the banners of the Children of the Night.

And Grym the Hermit—he was the first char I'd met in the game, basically my guru. How could I have forgotten old Grym, a natural Dark Priest! He really should have been the first person I invited to join our ranks.

Involuntarily my body twitched, about to jump up and rush to tell everyone about my epiphany when the Fallen One's heavy hand nailed me to the ground. "Don't rush. There's plenty of time. Have you already forgotten how this conversation started?"

Oh shit. Indeed I'd forgotten all about the new artifact. Annoyed, I slapped my forehead—and somersaulted backwards, seeing stars all around me.

I knelt in the dust, staring at the divine mark on my palm. Some power! Was it why the Fallen One had given it to me? I looked up at him but he shook his head in surprise.

"Just a random effect. It'll probably wear off eventually. The whole idea of this artifact is to prevent me from storming Lloth's citadel every time I need to rescue my priest from her torture chambers. Which is why I had to take care of your survival skills. My gift will absorb all the damage whenever your health drops below critical levels. You may call it the last line of defense, I suppose. If you see it cushion the blows aimed at you, it means you're deep in the shit, time to leg it. No stupid heroism, please: the item is disposable and non-regen. Make sure you don't waste its power for nothing."

I traced the outline of the mark, brushing off the dust. "How much damage can it take?"

He shrugged. "It might do fifty kee, I suppose."

"Holy shit. Do you think you could make it reusable? Or make a spare one—I have two hands, after all. If adamant is a problem, just tell me where you get it from and I'll send a team of mercs to go through the place with a fine-toothed comb..."

His ironic stare pinned me to the ground. I promptly gagged my inner greedy pig busy putting words into my mouth in the vain hope of a second helping of divine freebies.

"Mercs are a great idea. I do suggest though that you put your feud with Lloth on the back burner for the time being. We have more important fish to fry. First and foremost, you need to locate the ruins of the Unknown God's temple. His altar is neutral to both Dark and Light powers which makes it perfectly suitable for our purposes. I suppose you haven't forgotten your obligation to the Dwarves to summon Aulë, the god of earth and metals?"

Something in his stare made me concentrate and pull myself together. This was a serious matter. The Dwarven patriarch Thror had promised me seven million gold plus five hundred dwarf craftsmen to help restore my castle. That was nothing to sniff at. Even more importantly, I'd given him my word—the word of a First Priest, and the Fallen One wouldn't appreciate my reneging on it. Nor would he accept excuses like my having to deal with circumstances beyond my control, namely Princess Ruata's sudden change of heart. No one was going to forgive me the loss of face and the failure to bring thousands of dwarves under the Fallen One's banners.

So I gave a resolute nod. "Of course I haven't. This is a top priority mission, though I'd still appreciate any tips about the temple's location."

He lowered his lids in silent approval. "The Lost City. It's a new location which was created with the view to the players' future growth in the game. So expect level 200-plus mobs and all sorts of bosses, both mini and maxi. Be prepared. The Temple is in the city center as you would expect. The task is as straight as a die: you come, you kill, you take what's your own. Questions?"

"Er," I paused, watching a puppy flutter past. Bug-eyed with the effort, it flapped its pink wings—apparently, a gift from Macaria—forcing me to ask a totally irrelevant question, "Has she too much mana or something? I've never seen her being so generous."

The Fallen One smiled at his partner who threw us a quizzical glance, sensing our interest. "You won't believe it. The mana flow from voluntary deaths is so huge it would need ten times our current processing capacity. Tianlong is already choking on his share. We morph astral channels, creating additional accumulators, and still we have to dump most of it into neutral planes otherwise we risk burning down."

"You don't! What caused it then? Why all the voluntary suicide cases?"

He shrugged. "Asian cluster mainly. The number of Voluntary Deaths for Another is currently going through the roof there. Over six thousand an hour!"

"Weird. Slavery? Executions?"

"No idea. Whatever it is, I'm not going there just to satisfy my curiosity. The Chinese were one of the first to get hold of a divine artifact, restoring the Jade Palace and summoning its owner and their high god: Yu-Huang, the Jade Emperor."

A new god. That sounded interesting indeed. "Is he one of the gods of Light? Or is he on our side?"

The Fallen One shook his head. "Neither. He keeps his own counsel. He doesn't meddle in the other gods' squabbles so he's accumulated quite some power. He had to, with his hard-working religious followers who are only too happy to prove their faith with sacrifices. In short, he's no imminent danger even though sooner or later he might turn into a huge pain in the butt."

"Yeah. Honestly, it's as clear as mud. Very well, one problem at a time. The Chinese aren't our priority at the moment. Honestly, I feel like I can barely keep up with all the problems. You think you're finally up to date with something but every problem solved poses a couple of new ones! I don't think I can take it for much longer."

The Fallen One gave me an encouraging slap on the shoulder. "Divide and rule, as the Romans used to say. Delegation is the key, so find someone to reassign part of your responsibilities to."

He rose, gently pushing aside the mallorn's cuddly branch, and added with a wink, "No need to frown. It's quite doable, I assure you. I did find
you
, didn't I?"

I watched him walk away whistling. "Yeah, right. Where would you find another idiot like me?"

Chapter Three

F
rom the Olders Security Service monthly report:

In accordance with the magic dome shield reconfiguration program, we have placed auction bids and consequently purchased over fifty Minor and thirty Medium Domes which cover 41% of our needs. Our purchase pace admittedly didn't keep up with the panic demand that had virtually depleted all local vendor stocks. To make up for this slip in the schedule, we've sent buying agents to neighboring clusters. We've also sent a large mercenary squad to the Rock Forest location for a week with the task of farming particular ingredients pertinent to crafting dome artifacts.

We've appraised the results of the two operations—code names Crystal and Cat House—as negative. Both full partners Eli Logus and Lee Ortega have been downgraded to junior partners. Our direct financial losses aren't bad—about four million dollars in total. Our collateral losses, however, are more than ten times that. The information countermeasures, the elimination of existing financial and business setups, the change of avatars and taking the heat off over two hundred individuals and their subsequent physical protection and security measures in the real world—all this has cost us well over fifty million dollars.

As of the Purge operation: the following measures were applied to certain members of the Forest Cats community based on our analytics commission recommendations:

Forced avatar change, 117 members

Life ban from AlterWorld, 29 members

Individual strategic posting outside the Russian cluster in keeping with the clan's interests, 131 members

Indefinite imprisonment in the internal installation of La Bastille: 26 members. One escape attempt apprehended, resulting in a change in penitentiary regime levels from Comfort to Cage.

Physical purge in the real world, 3 members. In addition, two more clan members were eliminated by unknown snipers, supposedly victims' relatives.

Special third-degree treatment (known as brain kill) applied to three members of the Cats community and their Olders curator.

Five names added to the Clan's Overt Enemies List. The updated KOS lists forwarded to the relevant mercenary guilds and PK clans.

Twelve names added to the Clan's Secret Enemies List. The Karma group is currently working on creating various scenarios of increasingly complicating their living conditions.

Please find the name lists enclosed as a restricted attachment, confidentiality level: AA.

* * *

I watched the Fallen One, this funny fella of a god, as he left to reunite with his equally fun-loving girlfriend. Feeling like a mischievous teenager, I stole a glance around and reverently eased my backside into his just-vacated makeshift seat.

Warning! New place of power detected!

The astral layers in this particular place have been thinned down by either a divine presence, the wholehearted prayer of a saint or the use of top-level magic, revealing its extraordinary properties.

Effect 1: +100 bonus to all professions

Effect 2: +50% to your chances of creating a unique item

Holy Jesus. This little piece of furniture was worth its weight in gold! You really should cordon it off and post a goblin with a timer next to it, then charge ridiculous amounts of money for renting it out by the minute!

I remembered the conversation I'd had with Thror—the proud owner of the jewelry shop of the same name. He'd had one Dwarven Extra Dry too many, admitting to the fierce competition between the only three Famed Masters in goldsmithing in the entire Original City. According to him, they were fighting over orders capable of raising their skill just one point. One point! Here I had a hundred points plus the mind-boggling bonus of creating a unique item!

No, cordoning it off with goblins was no good. I should really build a mithril vault over it and post a platoon of guards all around.

Wow. I sat back and rubbed my hands, excited about all the possibilities that had opened up. This was indeed one very promising acquisition.

I pushed a curious mallorn branch out of my face. With an indignant rustle, the tree drew its canopy apart, exposing my head to the scorching sun. That I should live to see trees with an attitude!

I poked its slender trunk and said in all seriousness, "Listen you, Pinocchio material. Any idea how much mallorn wood goes for at auction? You'll have to try and convince me that keeping you will be worth my while. So stop all that nonsense, bring the shade back and brush the flies away while you're at it!"

Creaking indignantly, the tree obeyed, its healing shade protecting me from the sun as its lacy leaves rustled, diligently brushing non-existent flies away from my face while showering me with wood dust and leaf debris.

"Enough, hey! What's with all the junk? Where would a well-bred tree like yourself get all that from? Okay, okay. I didn't really mean it. Our relationship works both ways: so you can continue standing here basking in the sun having nothing to do while I enjoy your shade for a while. Deal? Excellent."

Having thus pacified the angry dendro sentient, I brushed the worms and wood dust from my knees and set about thinking.

Finances were my primary concern. Despite my enormous multi-million debt, the future—or at least the near future—seemed to be looking up. I'd been lucky enough to start mixing with gods which had brought me right into the thick of events, guaranteeing me my fair share of blows as well as some quite considerable freebies.

God's Blood. I still had four vials of it on me. This had been a one-off, so I'd better spend it wisely, considering the eternity I was facing.

Next, the Sparks of Divine Presence. I shook the tiny vial before my eyes, admiring the play of the iridescent snowflakes. I still had enough for another dozen scrolls or so. Then I'd probably have to ask the goddess to open up the celestial window again. She couldn't very easily say no as she had enough moral obligations toward me to last a lifetime.

True Tears of a Phantom Dragon. Two tiny stones instead of potential cratefuls—thank you very much, Lena. I didn't think I would part with them: +150 to any characteristic of my choice could seriously tip the scales in my favor in the upcoming survival battle. I needed every tool in my box of tricks to prevent my dying within the next year, so the best thing would probably be to define the polarity of the crystals and select Constitution as the bonus characteristic, adding a hefty fifteen hundred hits to my precious little self.

Tears of Stone. Same shit, only weaker. Available characteristics, +1 to +20, action bids vary from 5 to 500 gold. The best thing about them was, I had lots of them. Too many in fact—well enough to saturate the market and make prices tumble as the Castle—or should I say Lurch in his vulnerable emotional state—had sweated tens of thousands of Tears bemoaning the baby dragons' motherless desperation. I could always dump them at an opportune time and make a couple of million but I wasn't sure I was capable of destroying their heartwrenching beauty: at the moment, the castle sparkled like a Christmas tree, defying the myths of the Evil Overlord. Besides, I wasn't sure Lurch would appreciate my stripping the castle walls down to the original stone, so proud was he of his charge's new appearance. He could easily go bananas with shock and having a crazy AI around was the last thing I needed—not to even mention the fact that in him I risked earning myself a very nasty enemy. Last time I'd leafed through my daily financial report I'd discovered a new expense item: interior design, as the narcissic Lurch had subscribed to all and sundry interior design magazines and newsletters. It had to be some sort of post-traumatic syndrome after living the last eight hundred years in ruins. And still we'd managed to strike a shaky compromise. On Lurch's orders, a small goblin team supervised by Harlequin could now prize the precious crystals out in the most inconspicuous areas, providing the castle treasury with its first diamond vault. The only problem was, the little dragons had the habit of wandering about the castle, foraging for the stones and munching on them. Everybody did their best to shoo them away but still they'd made quite a dent in the castle walls.

Now the little dragons were my personal pain in the neck at the moment. If anything could drive my inner greedy pig to a heart attack, it had to be Draky and Craky. I dreaded to even think how much those two had cost us: the magic egg shells, tons of precious mithril and the yet unknown consequences of the events in the main square of the City of Light. We'd mowed down our fair share of people that day, earning ourselves some high-flying enemies not to even mention the Patriarch of Light himself! On the other hand, even though I'd never admit it in public, I just loved the little bastards. And I also knew that those cunning little shits could sense my love for them, manipulating my weakness the best they could. What was it their Bone Dragon mother Vertebra had said? They were going to be the first mithril Phantom Dragons in the whole world. The baby dragons were prime examples of the old "you are what you eat" adage. With people it was less noticeable, but still something to consider when placing your order in a fast food joint spiced up with half the periodic table—what kind of building blocks might you be feeding to your own body?

To sum the baby dragons up, I also nurtured the humble dream of one day growing them into some Godawful armored fighter craft. Touch wood, of course. I knocked on the mallorn's slender trunk, then had to shoo the curious tree away as it grew a small hollow at eye level in an apparent attempt to see what was going on.

What other strategic supplies did we have left? Mithril. I sent a quick request to the clan chat.

The dignified zombie dwarf stumbled in, delivering his report—hand-written on a piece of parchment, of all things. I turned it around within my hands, trying to work out how to digitize it back, then glared at the dwarf. He didn't bat a hair—actually his face was devoid of any kind of growth, long scorched off in the flames of ancient battles. He stood there, august like a king in exile, stroking habitually his non-existent beard as he stared above my head at the horizons only he could see.

So, what did we have here? Nearly nine tons of various alloys plus about thirteen hundred pounds of pure mithril, seven million gold in total. That's not counting benefication losses that should be quite considerable. Still, I wasn't in a hurry to dump it onto the market. I really didn't feel like swapping precious metal for any amount of virtual "funny money". What kind of warlord would I be without my own gold reserve? Better to hold on to it. Hopefully, I'd never have to sell it: I was looking at an eternity in which at some point I might have to clad countless Dwarven hirds in that same mithril.

I rolled the parchment up and shoved it into my bag, momentarily distracted by the Castle's utility menus. Ah, there it was: the storerooms. Status, filling percentage, contents report... it had everything I needed—little wonder as these were the contents of my own storerooms, after all.

I checked the parchment against their data. Everything looked hunky dory even though I had every reason to doubt the dwarf's submissiveness: he must have found it hard to come to grips with the fact that everything around him actually belonged to somebody else. I remembered passing the outhouses once hearing the clanging of metal and the sound of a hammer bashing away against the anvil. He must have had his own agenda, that one, and somehow I doubted he'd bought the metal with his own money. It's true that some jobs don't even need wages as the workers earn more just from what sticks to their hands. So I wasn't going to make a fuss about it. He was a good worker who kept my storerooms in perfect order and more importantly, those goblin hoodlums seemed to have a serious respect for him.

I wondered if he had access to internal interfaces. If you think about it, NPCs were part of the game and as such didn't need all the crutches in the shape of maps, radars and quest tabs. But he'd just received my message sent through the clan chat, hadn't he? He knew how to use the inventories: Lurch had already forwarded him long lists of the stocks he needed for the castle. Did that mean he was faking it?

I frowned. "Sir Durin, I suggest you spend some time familiarizing yourself with digital paperwork solutions. One can't be a good manager without knowing how to use them these days. You may go now."

He tilted his head in a barely perceptible bow and turned around, hurrying toward Wing Two. The place was in the middle of some large-scale renovations. Doc had some truly Napoleonic plans aiming to turn it into a cross between a children's holiday center and a boarding school. The breeze brought an occasional screeching of saws, the slapping of hammers and the inevitable cussing of the workers.

I glanced at the children who seemed to have laid their grubby little hands on one of the puppies and were now busy covering him in sand, making him into a statue of the Sphinx. I just hoped their parental controls were activated otherwise they would learn to cuss before they could read. On the other hand, in perma mode they'd have no access to the capsule's initial settings which meant that they'd stay forever in this PG-mode, hearing beeps in place of all four-letter words and seeing blurred pixels of gray in place of human blood. And even... God forbid!

I jumped, realizing that it also meant their inability to engage in sexual activities. The consequences it incurred made me shudder. What could I do? Should I PM Doc and tell him to change the parental settings? Having said that, I could always test them first...