You (23 page)

You climbed the ridge and looked off into empty pine forest. Your cousins’ trail was clear. You walked quickly, breaking through the snow at each step, already feeling too hot in your chain mail. Up ahead you heard what might be a man’s grunt—how far off? You started to jog, then ran to a cleared space, where your cousins were fighting four men.

They stood, swords drawn, with their backs to a tree. Berik, the fair one, was on one knee, with no wound showing but drops of blood in the snow around him. Four men were fanned out in front of them. They were dark-skinned, wearing embroidered cloaks. Southerners? Two held spears with bronze heads; one had a broad, short sword of old and discolored metal. One had a proper heavy longsword. It seemed silly, four against two, the kind of fight you’d fall into while goofing around at the end of arms practice. You weren’t supposed to win, just have fun battling the odds.

No one looked at you. Eran rushed the swordsman on his extreme left, trying to push him away from the others. Berik turned to watch, and a man
put a spear into him, soundlessly, once and then twice to be sure. Metal was banging against metal. You stepped forward and lunged at the spearman’s neck with your sword. It went right in and stuck there. It was like a trick, a sword through a man’s neck, made more absurd by the way the man stuck out his arms and looked around. You wanted to laugh, but another man with a sword ran at you and tackled you. You landed on your back, then twisted to the top, the way you used to wrestle your brothers, except this was a stranger, heavy and stinking of sweat and smoke and thrashing under you, biting unfairly as your brothers never would, and that was the enraging thing. You shifted your weight and pinned the man’s sword arm with your left hand and got your right forearm stuck under the man’s chin and pushed with all your strength for long, long seconds, long after you would have let up in a play fight. You held it there until your opponent stopped moving and someone jabbed you rudely in the small of your armored back.

You rolled to your feet with the attacker’s tarnished short sword in your hand. How had it gotten dark so fast? You remembered now how Eran had been calling your name for some time, then he’d stopped and turned into one of the black shapes on the ground.

Now you felt warm, like you could make the world go in slow motion. The last man was small, thick under his cloak, with wide-set eyes. He was castle-trained but fatally tired, and he knew it. It was almost too easy to knock his blade out of the centerline, slip his guard, and strike him in the temple with the hilt. The thought, involuntary, was that you were killing the third man of your life and no one was watching. You never knew who they were or what started the fight.

Your father’s men had gone, in which direction you couldn’t tell. It was starting to snow. You sobbed a few times with shock and exhaustion. The strangers’ camp wasn’t that far. You sat in the dark under the firs and watched snow fall, hissing into the coals. Your cousins were freezing solid a hundred yards away. Your mind jumped from one image to the next, Berik dying, the swordsman’s blue eyes, climbing the stairs of the roundhouse in summer,
your cousins talking about a peasant girl they’d shared, a girl you’d grown up with.

You woke up three or four times in the night, terrified, thinking you heard voices, and that was when you realized that what you dreaded most now was your father’s men coming back to find you and take you back to your old life, your coward of a father, and the name of a house that would never rise again. In two weeks, you thought, you could be anywhere.

I bought Brennan a shield with a griffin on it, crimson on a field of gold.

Prendar is the only one left. Quick and stealthy, with devastating surprise attacks. Forbidden from wearing metal armor, but bow, dagger, and sword are all permitted.

You can imagine Prendar’s home as clearly as you can your own. It was a muddy village of three hundred at most. Everyone knew him, everyone knew his mother was gone, and everyone knew his father worked his field during the day and at night sat in his home in the dark like a fucking ghost. He learned his letters from a priest who came through once every two weeks and taught whoever would listen. He knew the long chants that told the history of the world, and he could draw the shape of the entire continent in the dirt, with a dot for where the village was.

Prendar wore his hair long but the truth was obvious. Elven blood shows, even in a half-blood. It took a stranger to point it out, a traveler, drunk and hateful, who seized him by the hair and dragged him into the street. Prendar jerked away, and was out of the village before anyone had a chance to follow, over a low fence and through an overgrown field to the forest. He wasn’t hurt that badly, just bruises and a bloody nose. He stopped and washed his face. At least he was wearing shoes.

He had nowhere to go, so he waited in the woods for the priest to pass on his way to the village. The priest had already heard what happened. They talked a long time as they walked together from one league marker to the next. The priest gave Prendar his hat and a bronze coin stamped with a crown on one side and a coiled sea monster on the
other. He explained how to find due north using the stars, and made Prendar repeat it back. Prendar thanked the priest and, with no more ceremony than that, he set off walking.

(None of this has any relation to you, a person with normal-looking ears who went to high school and college in good order, who had normal parents and suffered no beatings to speak of. You would not, frankly, have had the guts in a million years to run away, no matter what you told yourself as you lay awake.)

The intervening years have given Prendar five inches in height and a cloak he can travel in, as well as matching long daggers he’s learned how to use. It’s late in the autumn season, and that long-ago quest was forgotten the first night he spent in a city.

He was paid prodigiously, but it was his last night in the city-state of Arn. The wars of the Second Age brought him better fortunes. But those wars ended some time ago. He wondered if his mother had survived them or lay dead in an unmarked field. He’d find her one day. Elves lived forever, didn’t they? Maybe he would, too.

The scarred, muscular man with long hair tied back in a bun and a hunted look around the eyes, a weathered, cord-wrapped sword hilt projecting above one shoulder. An older man, bearded, his cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread. A tall, pale half elf dressed in gray with sandy red hair and a beak of a nose. Like the older man, he wears clothes that were expensive a long time ago.

I’d never thought of them except as game pieces, as tiles on a map: sword, staff, arrow, dagger. In the new engine, they’re people. Each one stops in the doorway, hesitates, then slowly takes a seat in an unoccupied corner. They’ve seen each other across many battlefields but never before in peacetime, across the scarred wood of a tavern.

What now? There’s no reason to fight; all those reasons died with the Second Age. The great Four Heroes of the Second Age are now stateless wanderers.

They’re aware of each other. Lorac, who sits with his bitter ale half drunk, nervously ghosting through ritual gestures with limber hands. Prendar, who fidgets in his seat, well into his second tankard. He flirts with a bar maid, and plucks a white flower from her hair. Brennan, who sits completely still, staring straight ahead, one finger resting on the hilt of the sword leaning against the bench.

Only one corner remains free. The moment you, Leira, take a seat there, time accelerates. In the space of a few seconds the sky outside dims to blue-black, a yellow crescent moon surges into view, and twinkling stars appear. It’s approaching midnight, and most of the regulars have left. The fire burns low, but the four travelers haven’t moved from their corners yet.

The image fades out with the words,

AND SO THE FOUR TRAVELERS MADE A SACRED VOW, TO FIND AND DESTROY MOURNBLADE, AND TO RECOVER THE HYPERBOREAN CROWN OF THE KINGS OF OLD.

THIS WAS THE DAWN OF THE THIRD AGE, THE QUEST FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE WORLD.

It’s only when you finish the entire damned
Realms of Gold III
and start on the next one that you see one of the deep truths of the WAFFLE engine. Because when you type rogiv.exe, you get the prompt Import rogiii.dat?

Lorac reached in and depressed the Y key with one long, stained fingernail, then gave me a long look, as if to say, “On this everything depends.”

When played in order, each game imports the previous game’s end state. Which is to say, if a character found a unique item or a highly developed skill in add-on packs like the
House of the Unborn Duke,
that item or skill will be present in his or her character sheet at the beginning of
Forbidden Tales
. It was an odd idea but not unheard of, and it lent the game the quality of an Icelandic saga or a long-running soap opera. It even seemed as if the Heroes’ AI files noted certain experiences. As a player you never controlled more than one Hero at a time, and the Heroes you weren’t using were programmed to act reasonably autonomously while following you around—to fight when attacked, collect useful valuable items, and (usually) avoid walking off cliffs. After Prendar and Brennan were tricked into fighting each other in
Elven Intrigue,
Prendar never again healed Brennan in battle or even walked near him in the lineup.

I thought about how that was supposed to play out. They were video game characters. They’d been sentenced to run and jump for their entire lives, to quest and fight in causes not their own. Longer than their whole lives, because they’re going to die and be resurrected forever. They’re pieces in a cosmic game, and they know it. They can only do what you tell them.

In the tavern, they fall into conversation, haltingly at first. War stories, mostly. They’ve all heard the same story, told around the campfires of an army that marched west to the Elder Wars and the lost crown. The story of the king who fled south from Shipsmount when the dragons first came, who journeyed to the White Mountains and never returned, leaving his crown there. That crown was worn by the kings who built the walls that once surrounded this city, the kings who ruled before the great crash at the end of the Second Age.

And what brought that on? Brennan describes the aftermath of the battle, to which he arrived too late. Bodies piled high around a king, who died afraid. Mournblade, the cursed blade that is a cancer, the black sword, the black temptation that makes any wielder an immortal killer while slowly eating him or her alive.

Already the necromancer in the east and the merchants’ convocation, as well as any number of petty nations and warlords, were at work
tracing it. Mournblade had proven itself a weapon to devastate armies and murder sovereigns on the battlefield. And who would stop it from ravaging the world forever, for all the ages to come?

The fire dies and you, Leira, stumble to bed, still thinking of the feast days, which matter less than they used to, and the mean look in merchants’ eyes, and cheap, ill-made goods, and the feeling that one man cannot trust another, and what force, if any, can repair the broken world.

But it’s awkward in the morning. The four of you are in the tavern common room, the two southerners sitting together silently, Prendar and the wizard off in separate corners eating the gray oat mush the tavern offers. Without the firelight’s warm tones and flickering shadows, the room seems smaller. The stone floor is filthy, and the smell of urine cuts through the smoke.

The spell of last night is gone, and the remembered intimacy is embarrassing now. It would be easy to nod and step outside and keep walking, all the way up to Shipsmount in a day and a half, but somehow nobody does. You don’t want to forget about how it felt to talk about the crown. Everyone is waiting for everyone else.

The bearded man stands to go. You clear your throat. You’re lousy at breaking the ice.

“Where are you bound, mageborn?”

“West, perhaps, across the mountains, maybe. If it matters to you.”

“I might be going that way,” you reply. You sound younger than you mean to, and you hope he doesn’t notice. The last thing you need is another father figure.

The scarred man stands up and says, a little too eagerly, “We’re walking that way ourselves. To Orenar, perhaps, before the winter closes the pass.” He wears chain mail, and the hilt of his longsword is wrapped closely with fine wire, a journeyman’s sword.

“A strange chance, but mayhap a fortunate one,” you add.

“I’m Brennan,” says the swordsman to the room, pausing briefly, as if we might have heard the name.

“Leira,” you say.

“Lorac.”

“Prendar.”

I can feel them even though they’re not real, they’re not even fictional characters. They’re simultaneously less and more than real characters. Less because they don’t have real selves. They don’t have dialogue, or full backstories. They’re just a bunch of numbers. They’re vehicles or tools players use. They’re masks.

But more because part of them isn’t fiction at all, it’s human—it’s their player half. It’s you. Or Simon, or Darren, or Lisa, or Matt. And I wonder what that moment is like for them, when they become playable. It must be like possession, like a person succumbing to the presence of a god or daemon. A trance, then a shuddering, as of flesh rebelling against the new presence. Then the eyes open and they’re a stranger’s. The new body is clumsy; it stumbles around, pushes drunkenly against walls and objects, tumbles off cliffs.

But what’s it like for the god that possesses them? There’s a little bit that goes the other way. The fleeting impression of living in their world, playing by their rules.

The Heroes swore to find Mournblade themselves and destroy it—swore by the great secrets, by the fifty-six opcodes, by the sixteen colors and three channels and four waveforms, by KERNAL, whose stronghold is $E000-$FFFF, by the secret commander of the world, whose number is 6,502.

They didn’t know the vow would follow them through a hundred lifetimes, through the end of the Third Age and beyond. Through seven generations of console, through the CD-ROM and real-time 3-D and graphics accelerator revolutions. For that matter, they didn’t know they were characters in a series of video games.