“Sounds like a good bet. But I still think we should look into Argath.”
Megan made an “oh-why-not” face. “So exactly where is the big A at the moment?”
“Take a guess.”
“Minsar?” Megan looked bemused. “You’re kidding. What would he be doing there? Minsar’s much too downmarket for him. One free city isn’t going to keep his interest. Argath campaigns for whole countries. Look what he did over in Sarvent, and up north in Proveis! The city isn’t at a spot of any great strategic value either. The river’s not even navigable up that far.”
“No one’s really sure what he’s doing there,” Leif said. “Maybe the motive’s just revenge. After all, Shel did beat him once. There’s a power vacuum. Maybe now he thinks he can move in and take over.”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Argath’s been a pretty subtle operator in the past. Why would he do something so obvious?”
“Carelessness,” Leif said. “Certainty that he wouldn’t get caught.”
“Well…maybe. But, look, it’s like you say, we have to start somewhere….” Megan looked around. “Who do we order a drink from in here?”
“The innkeeper’s daughter. Her dad’s busy.”
Maybe it was Leif’s slight smile that made Megan give him a brief sharp look. Leif sat there looking innocent until the innkeeper’s daughter came by. Megan ordered tea. When it came, she spent a few moments sipping it and looking thoughtful, while Leif turned his attention to watching something that was going on in the darkness under a table off to their right. “So,” she said. “How’ll we get there? Walk? Or have you got horses outside?”
“Huh?” Leif looked up, briefly shocked. “Uh, no. I fall off horses.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t tell me. You ride.”
Megan made a wry face. “Actually, it’s not what I’m best at. I wouldn’t mind just long-marching it, except that Minsar’s some way from here, and I hate wasting the time.”
“Lucky for you you’re traveling with a wizard, then,” Leif said. “I have about three thousand miles saved up.”
He appreciated the quick relieved grin Megan flashed him. If you didn’t have a horse to help you get around Sarxos, or some other means of transport, like a litter-bearing team, or a tame basilisk to ride, you usually wound up walking…and it could seem to take forever: part of the designer’s plan to have you “really experience” his world. But players who chose to could take the points they accrued in play, not as money or power, but as transit: the ability to (with the use of the proper rapid-transit spell, one so simple even nonwizards could manage it) simply disappear from one spot and appear in another. Armies could not use this facility: Rodrigues had been quoted as saying that that would be “too damn much like real life.” But people traveling peaceably in company could use it to go wherever they liked.
“That’s a lot of miles,” Megan said. “What have you been doing in here to earn all that?”
“The usual hedge-wizard stuff,” Leif said. “Healing the sick…raising the dead.”
Megan raised an eyebrow. Few wizards in Sarxos were quite that powerful. “Well, healing the sick anyway,” Leif said, with a slight smile. “When I first got into the game, I bought a healing-stone from a wise-woman who was retiring. It’s a pretty good one, good against everything up to about level-five wounds and level-six disease.”
Megan blinked, apparently impressed. “Level five? Anything that can grow back a chopped-off arm or leg must make you pretty popular on the battlefield. How the frack did you afford something like that?”
Leif laughed softly. “Well, I shouldn’t have been able to really. But the lady was nice about it. I met her in the forest and she asked me for a drink of water, and I gave it to her—”
“Oh,” Megan said, “one of those old ladies. You did her a Good Deed, and she Rewarded you.” There was a lot of this kind of thing in Sarxos: Rodridgues was not above pillaging old fairy tales, and folktales, and fantasy stories of any age, from the present time straight back to Lucian of Samosata, for familiar and unfamiliar themes. As a result, it was usually a good idea to treat strangers considerately when you met them in the woods. They might be players in disguise…or they might be the game’s creator, interested in seeing if you were playing in the spirit he had intended.
“Well, rewarded, yeah, but she just gave me a discount. She didn’t give me the thing for free,” Leif said.
“All the same, sounds like you got a bargain.”
“I did. It’s as good a cover for me to go to Minsar as anything would be,” Leif said. “There are probably a fair number of wounded who haven’t been attended to yet, not by magic-workers anyway. What’s your excuse?”
“Same as usual,” Megan said. “Freelance trouble-maker-warrior, thief, or spy, as necessary, and according to who’ll pay me. I wander around, see who’s doing what to whom, and sell the information to whoever’s willing to pay the most. Do the occasional theft…in a good cause, of course. Fight, if it comes to that. Even here, where people should know better, they don’t always suspect soon enough that a girl or woman may be as good a fighter as they are, or better.” She smiled, a slightly grim look. “They suspect it even less when you don’t look like a giant shieldmaiden with a brass bra and a big spear. That suits me fine. I don’t mind exploiting archetypes…even if I’m only doing it negatively.”
Leif nodded, thinking. “It’s a good persona,” he said. “Spies have a good reason to be anywhere…even when they don’t, really. And they raise the level of paranoia around them just by being there. People let things slip that they might not have let slip otherwise.”
“Yup.” Megan drank more tea, then paused for a moment to look down into her tankard. “What the…There’s something in this.”
“What? Extra herbs?”
“Herbs don’t have this many legs. Just a bug,” Megan said, pausing for a moment to fish it out, examining it for a moment with a critical eye, and then tossing it over her shoulder. “Okay. So you’ve got plenty of miles. We’ll go after we finish here, then, if you’re ready.”
“Yup. I need a few moments to make sure of the coordinates before we go, that’s all. Don’t want to wind up in Wussonia by mistake.”
Megan looked at him with a bemused expression. “Wussonia? I don’t recognize the name.”
Leif grimaced. “It’s right over the other side of the Bay of Twilight,” he said. “Little place. Isolated. With good reason.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t look so interested! You wouldn’t want to go there.” Leif shuddered slightly. “The place is, well, it’s on the soft side. Full of homesick princesses disguised as bards wandering around on quests for the Magic Whatsit, and wise telepathic unicorns with big eyes full of some ancient sorrow, and little tiny dwarves with pointy hats that ride around on friendly forest animals. Miniature bears and badgers living in little houses built into the trunks of trees. Tiny fluttery fairies with gauzy wings.”
Megan made a face. “Sounds like it would be bad for your blood sugar.”
“Or your sanity. It’s not all that far from Minsar, that’s the problem. Misplace a decimal point in the transit spell, and we could wind up there. Or worse, in Arstan or Lidios.” He glanced again over at the guy who was, for the third or maybe the fourth time, cleaning his Glock-clone.
“No, thanks,” Megan said, “there are enough guns where I live already.”