Shel intended to be well away from here by then. His tent was already unable to keep out the battlefield stink of stamped-out guts — or of guts not lost, but just loose, the results of many a brave young warrior’s first encounter with the battlefield. War is hell, went the saying. But at the moment, Shel felt more inclined to substitute another four-letter word for “hell.” Certainly he would have preferred the smell of brimstone to the aroma most prevalent just now.
“It’s only a game,” he told himself…and then made a face. The game’s creator, a careful and thorough craftsman, had done his job too well for such bland assurances to make a difference. No action was permitted to evade its consequences. The air should have been sweet with the oncoming evening, and wasn’t. There would of course be a great celebration of Shel’s victory later, when he got back to Minsar, a mighty meeting to congratulate the heroes who had contributed to the win, and there the banners would fly and the trumpets would sing, and the bards would chant their praises…but not here. This place could be cleaned up by no lesser force than Nature, and even she would take some months about it. Even after the grass was green again and the daisies bloomed, the sheep that grazed these pastures would be working around swords and arrowheads and the stained bones of skulls for quite a few years.
At least the grass would be of high quality, and lush, come the later summer. Blood was an extraordinary fertilizer….
The tent-flap lifted. One of Shel’s guardsmen looked in, an old companion called Talch. Shel glanced up at him.
“When do you want to see him, sir?” said Talch. He was a big man, cavalry, still all spattered from today’s work, with mud and blood and Rod knows what else. He stank, but then so did Shel, and so did everyone else for a mile around.
“Twenty minutes or so,” said Shel, reaching across the map table for a pitcher of honeydraft. “Let me do something about my blood sugar first. Has he said anything?”
“Not a word.”
Shel raised his eyebrows, encouraged. Delmond was known for his tendency to brag even when he had lost, as long as he thought he had a chance of getting out of a situation. “Good. Have you had anything to eat?”
“Not yet. Nick’s been out hunting. Got a deer — they’re butchering it. But no one wants to eat here really….”
“Why would they? And we won’t either. Send someone up toward Minsar to start some cooking fires outside the walls. We’ll encamp there tonight. And tell Alla I’ll hear her report now.”
Talch nodded, and let the tent-flap fall. Shel looked at it and wondered, as he sometimes did, whether Talch was a player or a construct, one of many “extra” personnel whom the game itself contained. There were plenty of them, since most people preferred to play more interesting characters than guards and camp-followers; though you never could tell. One of the greatest generals of the twenty-two-year-run of Sarxos, the cavalry-master Alainde, had spent nearly two years playing a laundryman in the service of Grand Duke Erbin before beginning his startling rise through the ranks. At any rate, in the etiquette of Sarxos, “Are you a player?” was not a question you ever asked. It “broke the spell.”
If a player chose to come out to you, that was different, and afterwards you thanked them for their trust. But there were tens of thousands of players in Sarxos who preferred to remain anonymous as to both their names and their status, people who might dip into the Virtual Domain for an evening’s enjoyment every now and then, or who might come in night after night, as Shel did, in pursuit of something specific — amusement, excitement, adventure, revenge, power — or just escape from a real world whose reality sometimes became just a little too grinding.
Shel took a long drink of the honeydraft, and sat and thought, pausing a moment to shake himself, and scratch. More pine needles down his tunic…it would be days before they were all gone. He would really have preferred to do the rest of this evening’s work in the morning, but there was no telling what kind of trickery Delmond might attempt to pull if he were allowed the time. Even in his present strong position, Shel couldn’t ignore Delmond’s slippery reputation. The man’s mother, Tarasp of the Hills, was a wizard-lordling, one notoriously nonaligned, who shifted stances between Light and Dark without warning. From her Delmond had inherited both some small measure of power as a shapeshifter, and a dangerous shiftiness of temperament that made him capable of signing a peace treaty with one hand while holding, spell-concealed in the other, the knife intended for your guts. Once he had actually attempted such an assassination in a tent where he was supposed to be coming to terms with someone else who had beaten him in battle. There were people in the game who admired this kind of tactic, but Shel didn’t think much of it, and had no intention of falling foul of it now.
In the meantime, Shel wasn’t too worried about the success of any assassination attempt on him. Leaning against the tentpole, unsheathed, was his hand-and-a-half broadsword: a very simple-looking implement, gray steel with a slight blue sheen. It had many names, but then most swords in Sarxos did — the ones that were worth anything anyway. The sword that people around here called Ululator (or Howler) had a nasty reputation, and was well known for its ability to protect its master without him having to actually handle it. Few heard Ululator’s scream and lived to tell about it.
Shel cocked his head at the sound of footsteps outside, and the sound of complaints, and then emphatic swearing, in Elstern.
“Talch?”
A pause, and his guard stuck his head into the tent.
“Our boy getting impatient out there?” Shel asked.
His guard produced a sardonic grin and said, “Seems his dignity’s injured because we haven’t given him his own tent.”
“He should count himself lucky his dignity’s all that’s injured.”
“I think most of the camp would agree. Meanwhile, sir, Alla’s waiting, when you’re ready to start.”
“Ask her to come in.”
“Right, sir.”
The tent-flap fell, then was tossed aside again. Alla came in, her mail ringing softly over her long deerskin tunic as she moved, and Shel’s heart bounced, as it had done for a while now when he looked at her after a fight. She was a valkyrie — not literally, but in body type: big, strong but not overmuscled, and dazzlingly blond, with a face that could go from friendly to feral in a matter of seconds…which it did, on the battlefield. She was another of the people about whom Shel was most curious in Sarxos. Was she real on both sides of the interface, or just this one? Again, he wouldn’t ask, but in Alla’s case, Shel’s reticence had just a little more to do with nervousness than etiquette. He would have been unhappy to find that there was no Alla in the real world, and to find that there was one would immediately have raised the question And what are you going to do about it? For the time being, he left well enough alone. But someday, he thought, someday I’m going to find a way to work around to the subject myself…ever so gradually. And if she wants to say anything, well…
“How are you feeling?” Shel said. “Did you see the barber?”
She sat down, making a face that suggested she didn’t much see the need. “Yes…he stitched the leg up all right. Didn’t take long. He says it’ll be healed tomorrow — he put one of those sustained-release spells on it. How about you? Got the shakes out of your system yet?”
“Please,” said Shel. “It’ll be a week or more. I hate battles.”
Alla rolled her eyes expressively. “You must…you have so many of them. You want the accounting now?”