Apparently these visions did bother some players a little, for there were frequent attempts to find some explosive or gunpowder-analogue that would work in the rest of Sarxos as well, despite the game creator’s insistence that there was no such substance, nor would there be. Some players — aspiring alchemists, or would-be weapons dealers — would occasionally spend prolonged periods trying to invent such a substance. They tended to have accidents that were hard to explain except by an old Sarxonian saying: “The Rules take care of themselves.”
The black cast-iron handle of the door near Leif turned. The door creaked open, swinging toward him and hiding his view. The patrons stopped what they were doing and stared — they would always do that, even if the person coming in was someone they knew. But it plainly wasn’t, this time. They kept on staring.
The person who had come in now turned and shut the door. Medium height, slim build, long brown hair tied back tight and braided up around her head: dark clothes, all somber colors — brown tunic, black breeches and boots, a tight dark-brown leather jerkin over it all, dark-brown leather bands cross-binding the breeches, a dark brown robe over it all, divided up the back for riding, and a brown leather pack. If she was armed, Leif couldn’t see where…not that that meant anything.
She looked around long enough to complete her part of the staring game — for it was a game. You had to meet the crowd’s eyes, let them know that you had as much right to be here as they did…otherwise there would be trouble, trouble that you might or might not start, but would definitely finish. The patrons of the Pheasant and Firkin, perceiving this, became elaborately uninterested in the new arrival.
She looked over at Leif. He lifted his hat again, enough to let her see the red hair.
She smiled and came over, sat down in the other chair, and looked around her with a wry expression.
“You come here often?” she said.
Leif rolled his eyes at the tired old line.
“No, I mean it seriously. This place is an utter dive. How’d you find it?”
Leif chuckled. “I stumbled in last year, during the wars. It has a certain rural charm, don’t you think?”
“It has mice,” Megan said, pulling her feet back a little and looking under the table at something that ran by. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, here comes the cat….”
Leif chuckled. “You want something to drink? The tea’s not bad.”
“In a while. I take it you got the list from Winters.”
“Yup…a few days ago.” Leif pushed the tea-tankard away from him and sat looking thoughtful. “Parts of it surprised me. Problem is, if I knew those people at all, I knew most of them by their game-names and not by real-world names — otherwise maybe I would have caught on sooner. Probably a lot of people would have. But what’s plain right away is that all the people ‘bounced’ were very active players. No dillies.” Leif used the Sarxos term for “dilettantes,” people who played the Game less often than once a week. “And as far as I can tell, no ‘minor’ characters. All the people who got bounced were movers and shakers of one kind or another.”
Megan nodded. She apparently had noticed this, too. But she looked at him a little cockeyed. “A few days ago? I would have thought you’d want to get started looking around here right away.”
“Oh, I did.” Leif grinned at her. “But I wanted to do the first few pieces of groundwork on my own. If it turned out to be a waste of time, well, it was my time, not both of ours.”
“Oh. Okay. So where’d you go for your groundwork?”
“Up north, mostly.” Sarxos had two main continents, one north, one south. From the northerly one a great archipelago reached down in “the Crescent” toward the southern, making thousands of suitable havens for pirates, rebels, and those who wanted to take a few weeks off from the business of gaming to work on their virtual tans. “I was talking with a few people,” Leif said. “One of them was a guy whose game-name was Lindau.”
“Lindau as in the storming of the Inner Harbor?” said Megan.
“Yup. Not that he’s been storming much of anything since he was bounced. Also I had a chat with Erengis, who was Lindau’s archenemy for so long. She’s a regular gossip shop on two legs.” Leif stretched, glancing under the nearby table. “And I talked to a few other people who were enemies of Shel’s, or some of the other bounced people; and some of their friends.”
He must have looked a little smug, to judge by the expression on Megan’s face. “Right,” she said. “And did one particular name come up at all? Several times, in fact?”
Leif smiled slightly. “You’re there before me.”
“Argath,” said Megan.
Leif nodded.
Argath was the king of Orxen, one of the more northerly countries, a place mountainous and short on resources, except for large numbers of barbarians clad in beast-skins — people who loved to go to war at a moment’s notice. The place had earned itself the cognomen “The Black Kingdom” because of a tendency over many game-years to side with the Dark Lord during his periodic risings. Yet somehow it never itself got overrun, a cause of considerable annoyance and envy to some other players.
Argath had insinuated himself into the kingship of Orxen over the last game-decade by means that were considered normal in Sarxos. He had made a name for himself as an effective general of the Orxenian forces during the period of rule of a weak and ineffective king. No one was terribly surprised when elderly King Laurin apparently had an accident near his fishpond late one night, and was found in the morning head down among the bemused koi by his body-servants, several hours drowned. No one was surprised when the murder failed to be pinned on anyone specific; and no one was surprised when Argath was elected king by acclamation, the unfortunate King Laurin having outlived all his heirs.
Argath’s career after that had been unremarkable, by Sarxonian standards. He campaigned in the summer, like most people did, and intrigued during the winter, setting up agreements with other players, or weaseling out of them. He won battles, and lost them, but mostly he won: Argath was good at what he did. Shel had fought him a game-year or so previously, in the same kind of skirmish that Shel had had with Delmond, and Shel had won, which had surprised some of the locals. Argath’s army had been much bigger than Shel’s.
“And Argath,” Megan said, “is not a construct — not an artifact or built-in feature of the game.”
“No, he’s ‘live,’ I know,” Leif said. “Someone told me once what he does in real life. It sure looks kind of like Argath might have it in for anybody who had beat him in a fair fight.”
“But only recently,” Megan said. “All these bounces are within the last three years of game-time. Why would he just start going after people all of a sudden?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Leif shrugged. “Something happens at home. Something snaps. All of a sudden he starts playing rough.”
“Well, maybe, but we don’t have any evidence to support that idea,” Megan said, “and Sherlock Holmes says it’s a bad move to hypothesize without enough data. Anyway, all we’ve got so far is circumstantial evidence.”
“We’ve gotta start somewhere, though,” Leif said. “Argath’ll do, unless you can think of somewhere better.”
“I don’t know if it’s better,” Megan said. “I had been thinking of going up to Minsar.”
“Where the last bounce happened.”
“Not so much because of the location itself. But that’s where, as they say, ‘the eagles are gathered together.’ An army, even a little one, doesn’t have its commander go missing-and-presumed-bounced without attracting a lot of attention, and that’s where they’ll be based until the situation sorts itself out…until they find a new lord to swear allegiance to, or decide to disband. We could find out a lot while everyone’s descending on the place to do the sorting.”