The Deadliest Game nfe-2 Read online

  Leif pushed his way through the part of the market reserved for the butchers, past the last few beef carcasses hanging in the late sun with clouds of flies shrilling about them, and came to a spot by the curve of the wall where someone had parked a cart. It was from here that the rhythmic ting-CLANK sound came. Nearby, its head down and its reins fastened to an iron ring in the back end of the cart, a big, patient blond draft horse stood. Just in front of the horse, working at an anvil lifted up onto what had been some rich Errint’s mounting-stone, was a small, fair man in a light, worn tan canvas shirt and well-worn leathern breeches, with a thick leather apron over it all, hammering away at a horseshoe that had just been in the portable forgepit, which had come out of his cart and now stood near the anvil on the ground. The bellows hung at hand in the cart’s framework, ready to work. The farrier paused a moment to pick up the horseshoe with his tongs and shove it in among the coals to heat again. When it came up to cherry-red, he took it out with the tongs and began beating it again on the anvil.

  “Wayland,” Leif said.

  The face that looked up at him was deeply lined, all smile lines. The eyes had that distant-looking expression of someone mountain-bred, though not these mountains. “Well, it’s young Leif,” Wayland said. “Well met in the afternoon! What brings you up here this time of year?”

  “Just wandering around,” Leif said, “as usual.”

  Wayland looked at him with a grin that suggested he might be taking what Leif said with a grain of salt. “Ah, well, may be, may be.”

  “I might ask the same of you,” Leif said. “You’re not usually up here this close to autumn. I thought you’d decided you didn’t want any more of this weather. Lowlands for me, I thought you said, come the fall.”

  “Aah, it’s still summer, though, isn’t it?” said Wayland. He dropped his voice. “And as for you, with your healing stone and all, I don’t think you’re just wandering. My money says you have some other reason to be here.”

  “Hate to see you lose your bet,” said Leif, sitting down on the side-step of the cart, out of the way. For a couple of minutes he just sat and watched Wayland finish hammering the horseshoe. Wayland plunged it into a bucket of water nearby; the water boiled and hissed in a rush of steam. The horse flicked its ears back and forth, unconcerned. “Man wants to make a living,” Wayland said casually, “you’ve got to go where the business is going to be.”

  “You think there’s going to be business here?”

  “Oh, aye,” said Wayland, fishing with the tongs in the bucket to get the horseshoe out. “Plenty of business soon, I think.” He glanced in the direction of the city gates, up and over the walls, eastward down the long valley. “Going to be fighting around here before long.”

  He lifted the draft horse’s right forefoot, caught it between his knees, and turned his back on Leif for the moment. “Who would you say?” Leif said.

  For a moment Wayland didn’t say anything. He glanced over his shoulder — rather hurriedly, Leif thought — and then down to his work again. Leif looked over his shoulder, the way Wayland had looked, and saw, past the various people still walking in the marketplace, past the beef carcasses, a strange little shape go by. A strange small man, less than four feet high. Not, as correctness would have it, a small person, but definitely a dwarf. He was dressed in noisy, eye-hurting orange and green motley, with a scaled-down lute strung on a baldric over his shoulder.

  The little man passed out of view for a moment. “Duke Mengor has come visiting,” said Wayland, apropos of apparently nothing.

  “Visiting Lord Fettick?”

  “Aye, aye.” Wayland put the first of the nails into the first of the holes made for it in the horseshoe, drove the nail in halfway, and then started beating what was left of it upward and outward, clenching it up and around the edge of the shoe. “Been here a day or so, talking about whatever high lords do talk about. Nice dinner last night up at the High House.” He glanced sidewise up at the modest little castle that sat inside the city’s innermost ring. “Some talk about Fettick’s daughter being of marriageable age.”

  “Is she?”

  Wayland’s face worked, and he spat. “Well, she’s fourteen. Might be marriageable down south, but…” He raised his eyebrows. “Well, no accounting for foreign ways.”

  “Do you think this marriage will come off?”

  “Not if something else does first,” said Wayland, very softly. “Someone’s trying to save his skin.”

  Leif dropped his voice right down too. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Argath, would it?”

  Wayland gave Leif a sidelong look, and spat into the fire: an old mountain gesture suggesting that some words were better not spoken at all, let alone too loudly. After a few seconds, he spoke. “Heard someone say that his armies were gathering. Not sure where they are this moment, though.”

  Leif nodded. “Heard, too,” Wayland said, barely above a whisper, “that someone who should have brought him to fight, and beaten him…didn’t manage it.”

  “Elblai,” Leif said, in a matching whisper.

  “Saying is,” Wayland said, “she got bounced.” And he spat in the fire again.

  Leif thought quietly for a second, watching Wayland go back to clenching down the nails of the horseshoe. He finished the last one, then dropped the hammer and picked up a big rough file, and started rasping the edges of the nails down. “Wayland,” Leif said, “would you have time to talk a little later?”

  “Surely,” Wayland said after a moment. “Why not?”

  “Somewhere quiet.”

  “You know the Scrag End down in Winetavern Street? Between the second and third walls, going sunward from the gates.”

  “The place with the beehive outside it? Yeah.”

  “After dark, then?”

  “Fine. Two hours after sunset be all right?”

  “Fine.” Wayland straightened up from his work. “Well, then, youngster…”

  Leif raised a hand in casual farewell, and walked away through the market, looking idly at the few things still laid out on the stalls: bolts of cloth, a last few tired-looking cheeses.

  He was glad to have run into Wayland. The man was a noticing type, worth knowing. Leif had known him for quite a while, since his first battle in Sarxos after picking up the healing-stone. They had in fact met in a field hospital, since farriers, skilled with hot metal and the cautery, were much in demand on battlefields where magic-workers couldn’t be found. Wayland had been surprisingly gentle with the men he had been treating, for all that the treatment itself was brutal. He missed little of the detail of what was going on around him, and had a phenomenal memory. At the moment, Leif was glad of the possibility to talk over Sarxonian matters with someone besides Megan. A variety of viewpoints never hurt.

  He wandered back out in the direction of the cookshop. And his heart jumped inside him as someone tapped his shoulder from behind.

  He spun away from the tap, as his mother had taught him, and came around with his hand on his knife.

  It was Megan.

  She gave Leif a wry look. “I thought you said you were going to meet me inside the cookshop.”

  “Oh…sorry. I got distracted. I ran into somebody I knew.”

  “You mean you haven’t been in to pig out on the chili yet?”

  His stomach abruptly growled. “Chili,” he said.

  Megan grinned. “Come on,” she said — and then paused at the sound of a voice raised in peculiar song on the other side of the market stalls.

  “What the frack is that?” Megan said. The voice was accompanying itself on something very like a ukelele.

  Now I will sing of the doleful maid,

  And a doleful maid was she,

  Who lost her love to the merman’s child

  In the waves of the great salt sea—

  The owner of the voice, if you could call it that, came wandering out among the awnings and the tables, trailed by the raucous laughter and catcalls of some of the stall-ke
epers as the song got ruder. Its source was the dwarf in the noisy motley. He paused by one of the stalls, a fruit stall in the process of being packed up, and began strumming rather atonal chords one-handed, while trying to snatch pieces of fruit with the other. The fruit-seller, a big florid woman with a walleye, finally lost her temper and hit the dwarf over the head with an empty basket. He fell over, picked himself up again, and scampered away, laughing a nasty little high-pitched laugh reminiscent of a cartoon cockroach.

  Megan stared after him. “What was that?” Leif said to the fruit-seller.

  “Gobbo,” said the fruit-seller.

  “Sorry?” Megan said.

  “Gobbo. That’s Duke Mengor’s poxy little dwarf. Some kind of minstrel he is.”

  “No kind of minstrel, madam, not with that voice,” said one of the butcher’s men who was going by with a quarter beef-carcass on his back.

  “Some kind of jester, too,” said the fruit-seller. “And some kind of nuisance. Always running around, picking and thieving and looking for trouble. Getting under people’s skirts…”

  “You’re just jealous ’cause he didn’t want to get under your skirt, madam,” said another of the stall-keepers who was packing up.

  The fruit-seller rounded on the man and began to assail his ears with such a flow of language that the stall-keeper hurriedly vanished behind someone else’s stall. Leif chuckled a little and turned back toward Attila’s. Megan stood there a moment, gazing off toward where the dwarf had vanished.

  “I don’t know why,” she said to Leif, “but he looks familiar….”

  “Yeah….” Leif looked where she did, and then said, “I’ll tell you why. You saw him in Minsar.”

  “I did? Maybe I did.” Then she remembered the strange little figure with the sword, running through the torchlit marketplace, laughing that bizarre little laugh. She shuddered — she couldn’t quite figure out why. “If he was all the way over there,” she said softly, “what’s he doing all the way over here of a sudden?”

  Leif took her arm and tugged her toward Attila’s. “Look,” he said, “we were all the way over there, and now we’re all the way over here. Nothing odd about it.”

  “You sure?” Megan said.

  She watched Leif get that thinking look…and slowly the look began to shift into something else: suspicion.

  “I wonder,” he said.

  “So do I. But first things first,” Megan said, and this time it was she who took Leif’s arm. “It’s tough to wonder on an empty stomach.”

  “All right,” he said. “And then…afterwards…we have a meeting.”

  “Oh?”

  “Come on…I’ll tell you all about it. Assuming I can talk at all while we’re eating. This chili is so hot—”

  “How hot is it?”

  “They use it to discipline dragons.”

  “Come on. I’m ready!”

  About an hour later, they were both sitting alone in a corner at Attila’s, trying to recover from their dinner. “I can’t believe I ate that,” Megan said. “I can’t believe I ate that twice.” She was looking at the remains of her second bowl.

  Leif chuckled, and had a swig of his drink. There was no cure for Attila’s chili except cold sweet tea with cream, so both of them were drinking that, out of tall ceramic cups.

  “I feel sorry for the dragons you were mentioning,” Megan said.

  Leif cocked an eye at the window. “It’s getting close enough to sunset,” Leif said. “We should probably go ahead.”

  “Okay. But finish telling me what you started to,” Megan said, “about Wayland.”

  “Oh, no, I was finished.”

  “It was something about his name.”

  “Oh, that…it’s a just a generic name for a wandering smith. A small joke. But he’s a good one. And he gets around. He hears a lot. There was something else I was going to mention before we went to see him, though.”

  Leif glanced around them. The lady who owned Attila’s had gone out to stand in the cool of the approaching evening, leaning against the door opening into the marketplace plaza, where she was chatting with some passerby.

  Leif said quietly, “Before I came into Sarxos today, I wanted to do some work on something else that occurred to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, you said that there had to be some more systematic way to go about this search for the ‘bouncer.’ It seemed to me that you were right. So I thought, if it’s not a question of who’s beating Argath in battle — because plainly we’re meant to think that it is — then the question becomes who, what player or character, has also been beaten in battles or skirmishes by the same people? By all the same people who’ve beaten Argath?”

  Megan looked at him thoughtfully. “See,” Leif said, “you have to consider the problem as if it were a problem in set theory, something you could set up as a Venn diagram, something that looks sort of like a Sarxos version of a MasterCard logo. You have to look at the whole history of battle in Sarxos for a couple of years, to see where there are overlaps in terms of who was fighting who. And the overlaps have to be exact, for the cover to be successful. Do you follow me?”

  Megan blinked and then nodded. She knew analysis was one of Leif’s strong points; it was just slightly startling to see him pull it out of the hat like this. “Okay,” she said. “So what did you find?”

  “Well, to begin with, the business of having battles in Sarxos isn’t terribly organized. It’s not like there’s a set schedule or anything. But there is a tendency for members of a given group of players to fight most of the other members of the same group — the groupings being loosely based on area. Partly it’s just the logistics of the game. It’s costly in terms of weeks of game-time to move large numbers of people, large armies, from one end of Sarxos to the other. It’s just not logistically feasible. When’s the last time you heard of a North Continent-South Continent battle?”

  Megan shook her head. “I don’t think I ever have.”

  “There was one,” Leif said, “but it was twelve years ago, game-time, and it bankrupted both sides. Worse, no one even actually won it — it came out a stalemate, because several countries on the borders of both the North Continent and South Continent realms that were fighting took that opportunity to attack the countries that were attacking each other. It was a situation kind of like the one during the American Revolution, but much worse: the way France and the Netherlands and other countries, diplomatically or in the field, took the opportunity to gang up on Britain while Britain was trying to have a war with the United States.

  “But anyway, ’tween-continent wars just don’t seem to happen here anymore; there’s no percentage in it.” Leif leaned back in his seat. “So you’ll get countries who can raise enough people for armies — which is most of them; everyone loves to fight, and half the people in Sarxos are here for ‘battlefield work’—and who, over the course of the late spring-summer-early autumn campaign season, tend to fight everyone else available during that period. They end up going to war with practically everyone in that ‘league’ or ‘group,’ simply because they’re physically close. The ‘leagues’ are pretty evenly spread across the total play area.”

  “Isn’t that a little weird?”

  “In the real world, maybe it is. But here…I sat down with the map of Sarxos, and I noticed something very interesting about what Rodrigues did when he was building this place. He made sure there are no populated areas completely lacking in strategic value. No matter where you live, no matter what country you’ve inherited or conquered, there’s always something useful about it. But more to the point, there’s always somewhere more interesting, someplace with things you could use, just over the horizon or the hill. You’ll have one rich country sandwiched between two or three smaller, poorer ones. Or a big, powerful country will find itself surrounded by a number of other countries that just aren’t feasible for it to attack. Look at Errint, for example. Argath is just over that way, and he should have found it easy to ov
errun this place with his big armies, but he can’t because of the mountain range between him and Errint. Its passes were apparently very carefully placed to make invasion difficult.”

  “Built-in frustration,” Megan said.

  “More than just that, I think,” Leif said. “Rod in his infinite wisdom”—Leif glanced at the ceiling with an amused look—“has built the seeds of conflict into this place. But also the seeds of stability, to keep everything balanced. He’s been very subtle about it.”

  “Did you figure all this out yourself?” Megan said, both impressed and amused.

  “Huh? Most of it,” Leif said. “A couple of books have been written on Sarxos, but by and large the authors didn’t know what they were talking about, or they got caught up in the wonder of the external details, the computer interface and the points system and all, and never got into any depth.”

  “Well, it all sounds like good sense to me,” Megan said. “If you’re a game designer, you want to make sure your players don’t get bored. Though I’ll say that Sarxos doesn’t seem to be in any danger of that.”

  “True enough. But Rod has been sneaky about it. Leaving Arstan and Lidios out of the equation — they’re special cases because of the ‘gunpowder rule,’ and mostly they fight each other rather than other countries — it seems to me as if there are two alternating sets of pressures in the game. One is brought to bear by the players. They want to keep things working the way they’re working, by and large, and they only want things to change in ways that suit them. The other set of pressures, I think, come from Rod: pressures to make sure that situations that are static don’t stay static forever, and to keep things which are changing from changing too quickly, or too much. If you look at the abstracts of play for the last ten game-years, you get a sense that here and there, Sarxos is being given a nudge…a kick. A trend will start going in one direction in one country — remember that slavery thing in Dorlien? — and then something will happen to sort of nudge the place back on course. Or another place will have behaved the same way for a long time, and something will happen, all of a sudden, seemingly just at the right moment, to push it off the tracks and off in a completely new direction.”