Sarxos, here I come!
2
The tavern had only one room, and its roof was leaking. The rain, which was falling softly and steadily outside, was coming in through a bare place in the thatch, dripping morosely on the cracked slate hearth of the fireplace, and hissing and steaming where it hit. Smoke from the badly vented fireplace was rolling around, blue as smog, underneath the blackened rafters. A few sputtering lamps hung from those rafters, their light swimming in the smoke, some of the light actually making its way down to the ancient, massive, knife-scarred wooden tables underneath.
At those tables sat a motley assortment of people, eating and drinking: peasant farmers in from the fields, nobles ostentatiously sitting on their folded-up cloaks so that they wouldn’t have to physically touch the benches, mercenary soldiers in scarred leather armor, well-dressed foreign merchants talking animatedly among themselves about the Sarxonian investment markets and how the present wars would affect them; in other words, the usual Moons-day night crowd at the Pheasant and Firkin, everyone swilling down herbdraft or gahfeh or the host’s watered (but fortunately unleaded) wine, eyeing one another suspiciously and having a good time.
In the chimney-corner there was even the obligatory dark, hooded stranger with his feet up on one massive firedog, smoking a long pipe, his eyes glittering from under the hood as he watched the company. A large dingy-white cat with ragged ears and one eye gone milky-blind walked past the stranger, glancing at him, said, “Huh. You again…” and kept on walking.
Leif Anderson, sitting at the far side of the tavern, alone at a small table near the door, looked around the tavern and thought absently that, in a way, it was the kind of place his mother had always warned him about. The problem was that, in her more protective moods, she was worried that he might stumble into a place like this in the real world, and he very much doubted that there were any: at least, not where he was likely to run into them, in New York or D.C. Outer Mongolia, possibly, or the Outer Hebrides, or the Yukon maybe. He smiled slightly. It always amused him when someone as tough as his mother, who had danced for years for the New York City Ballet, and therefore had a physique like spring steel and a tongue like a razor, got all worried about her “little boy”—as if he had not inherited any of that toughness himself.
The innkeeper loomed over him suddenly. “You using that other chair?” he said. He was an archetype, just as much as the guy by the fireplace: fat, balding, wearing an apron that had apparently last been washed before the present Dragon cycle began, and in perpetually foul temper.
Leif looked up. “I’m waiting for someone,” he said.
“Great,” the innkeeper said, grabbing the spare chair with one hand. “When he turns up, you can have another chair. I need this for the paying customers.”
Leif picked up the tankard of herbdraft he had been nursing and waved it meaningfully at the innkeeper.
“Tough,” the innkeeper said. “You want another chair, you pay for another drink.” He started to laugh at his own alleged wit, exhibiting teeth like something from a dentist’s horror novel.
“It is unwise,” Leif said, “to insult a wizard.”
The innkeeper looked him over with a sneer, plainly unimpressed by what he saw — a slender young man in a somewhat ragged robe decorated with faded and obscure alchemical and magical symbols. “You’re nothing but a hedgie,” the innkeeper scoffed. “What’re you going to do? Not leave a tip?”
“No,” Leif said mildly, “I’ll give you a tip.” He pulled off his hat, fumbled around in it for a moment, and then came up with what he had been looking for. He threw it at the innkeeper, and said one word under his breath.
The innkeeper caught it by reflex — stared, for a moment, at what looked like a piece of rag tied up with string — and then got a startled expression. From nowhere, a puff of smoke appeared and wrapped itself around him. All around the inn, heads turned.
The smoke slowly cleared. Where the innkeeper had been standing, there was now a small white mouse sitting on the floor, looking around it in shock.
Leif leaned down and picked up the wrapped-up talisman from beside it. “Even hedge-wizards,” he said, “know some spells. That a good enough tip?” And he glanced under the next table before looking back at the mouse. “Have a nice day.”
The mouse turned to see what had caught Leif’s attention…and saw the beat-up white cat walking toward him with an expression that suggested it was ready for a predinner snack.
The mouse ran off across the cracked and worn flagstones of the floor, with the cat heading after it, not really hurrying, just enjoying the prospect of its hors d’oeuvre.
The other patrons of the inn turned away, not too concerned about this, since the innkeeper’s daughter, totally unconcerned, had begun making the rounds and taking drink orders. Leif tucked his talisman away and sat back with his drink again, his attention distracted once more by the sound of the foreign merchants discussing the futures markets.
Here as in the real world, there was a hot trade among the merchants in hog-belly futures, and Leif had no trouble imagining his father sitting right here with these guys and talking margins and short-sells until the cows, or the hogs, came home.
I really should try to get him in here sometime, Leif thought idly. We might be able to make some “money.” His father’s talent with investments, though, kept him hopping all over the planet, physically as well as virtually: so much so that he pretty much refused to spend his scarce leisure time anywhere virtual, or doing anything that sounded even slightly like “talking shop.” If I could get him in here, he’d probably much rather be some kind of berserk warrior in a loincloth. Anything to get out of a suit….
Leif’s attention was momentarily attracted by another of the patrons across the room, a tall, lean, intent young man in a dark jerkin who was methodically checking and clearing a gun, some kind of semiautomatic with a Glock in its ancestry. Normally one might have expected this to cause some stir, but the Pheasant and Firkin was located in the little princedom of Elendra, and Elendra was one of the places in Sarxos where gunpowder didn’t work. It didn’t work in most places in Sarxos, actually. The creator of the game had been making his alternate world mostly for those who preferred strictly mechanical weapons, preferably the kind that meant you and your enemy had to get up close and personal to kill one another.
But Chris Rodrigues had also apparently suspected that there would always be those for whom life would not be complete without weapons that went BANG, the more frequently and the more loudly the better, and for them, Sarxos had the adjacent countries of Arstan and Lidios, where explosives and other chemical-based weaponry were enabled. They were noisy places, featuring frequent wars with high body counts. Many Sarxonians made it a point to avoid Arstan and Lidios entirely, reasoning that it was better to let the boys and girls who were inclined that way just get on with what made them happy, and not distract or upset them with annoying visions of a world where people did business differently.