Mountain of Black Glass

  Beezle had first taken him to what had once been the site of Senbar Flay's magical tower, but the building was gone now, removed from what according to Beezle had been permanent non-status on the Middle Country's books. Testimony to the speed of virtual urban renewal, another wizard's castle already stood in its place, a small, jeweled fantasy of Moorish minarets. Attractive starter chateau for sorcerers, Ramsey had imagined the real estate listing. There were even rumors of a sentry-djinn guarding the premises, which the lawyer had no intention of trying to prove or disprove. It was clear there was nothing to learn from this particular site. The child who had once played the wizard's character was still in the same place—on life-support in a Florida hospital—but as far as the Middle Country was concerned, Senbar Flay was now history.

  A ride into the distant Catspine Mountains that used almost a week of his pathetically sparse personal time furthered Ramsey's run of disasters. Xalisa Thol's mound, the place where Beezle said the whole thing had begun, was gone, too. The local inhabitants talked nervously about the night it had disappeared, of a blizzard of ice that had kept everyone indoors and the snow wolves that had made it seem a good idea not to hurry out right after the storm ended.

  So Ramsey had returned to Madrikhor, hoping to turn up something the old-fashioned way. In real life he had walked into some of the ugliest neighborhoods of Washington and Baltimore seeking information in personal injury cases, so how bad could playing gumshoe in a virtual fairy tale be?

  Worse than he had expected, as it turned out. Even the most unpleasant inhabitants of the Edwin Meese Gardens housing project had never tried to shove a basilisk into Ramsey's codpiece.

  He was in a small, down-at-the-heels tavern named The Reaver's Posset, finishing his cup of mead (and counting his lucky stars that he had not invested more in the taste-simulation aspects of his gear) when a figure lurched up to his carefully chosen seat in one of the darker corners. It had been a long, frequently painful day, and the Posset was in one of the dingier neighborhoods of Madrikhor, so when the stranger stopped before him and then another unfamiliar figure stepped in beside the first, Ramsey sighed and braced himself for another thrashing.

  "Ho!" said the taller of the two, a muscular, square-jawed fellow with a long mustache. "We hear that you seek information."

  "And we have information to sell, forsooth," said his companion, a wiry little orange-haired man, a moment later. There was something oddly similar about their voices, although the little man's was a bit higher.

  "Oh?" Ramsey tried not to show any interest. In a city full of people playing elaborate games, nothing would have surprised him less than someone wanting to take some of his money, but nothing would have surprised him more than getting something useful in return. "What makes you think this information of yours is something I want to pay for?"

  "Gadzooks, and have you not been asking all over the Adventurer's Quarter for tidings of Thargor, the dark one?" said the large fellow. "Well, forsooth, it is Belmak the Buccaneer and his companion, the Red Weasel, who stand before you. We can help you."

  There was a pause, then the little one piped up, "For gold, of course."

  "Of course." Ramsey nodded gravely. "Give me an idea of what you know and I will give you an idea of what I might pay." He was feeling less worried about a thrashing now, although he was still fairly certain his time was being wasted. If the real people behind these comic-opera swashbucklers turned out to be even of driving age, he would be very surprised.

  "We will take you to someone who can tell you where Thargor is," said the Red Weasel, winking roguishly. He appeared to hurt himself doing so, or perhaps a cinder from the fire blew into his eye, because he spent the next few moments alternately blinking and rubbing at it. When he had finished, his companion abruptly sprang into movement, as though he had been waiting for some cue.

  "You must follow us, yea and verily," the mustached fellow announced. "Fear not that harm will come to you, because you have the word of Belmak, who has never yet played a man false,"

  "What do you think, Beezle?" Ramsey subvocalized. "It's the first lead we've had since we've been here. You ever heard of either of these guys?"

  "Don't think so, but people change characters around here sometimes." The invisible bug seemed to be thinking it over. "Might as well try it. I'll just cross-file the information on every-thing we've done so far today, so that if we have to drop off, we don't need to redo a bunch of stuff next time."

  "Very well," Ramsey said out loud. "Lead on. But no tricks." It was almost impossible not to fall into the b-flick melodrama of the place.

  Either both Beimak and the Red Weasel were much the worse for drink or they came from some distant place where the ground was quite a different shape, because neither of them could walk particularly well. They were also completely silent, and as they led Ramsey through the slick, cobbled alleys of the Adventurer's Quarter beneath a light drizzle, he tried to figure out what was bothering him about the two of them.

  "I confess that I do not recognize your names, noble heroes," he said. "Perhaps you could tell me something of yourselves. I fear I am a stranger here."

  Belmak the Buccaneer walked three more steps, then turned back to Ramsey. His companion staggered on a few more paces before stopping, like a man carrying a bowling ball in each trouser leg. Oddly, he did not turn as Belmak spoke.

  "We are famous not just in Madrikhor, but in Qest and Sulyaban as well, and all the cities that look upon the Great Ocean. Famous." He fell abruptly silent.

  "We have had many adventures, forsooth," the Red Weasel added, still facing in the other direction. He and Belmak then resumed their uneven progress.

  "Beezle, what's with these guys?" Ramsey whispered.

  "I don't think it's 'guys,' buddy," the bug answered. "I think it's 'guy.' Like, one person trying to run two sims—and without very good gear."

  "Is that why he's having so much trouble making them both walk?" Ramsey felt a laugh begin to bubble inside him.

  "That ain't all—you notice they can't walk and talk at the same time either?"

  It was too much. A great huff of amusement almost doubled him up, and he found himself struggling not to dissolve completely into giggles. Like mechanical figures on a medieval clock tower, Belmak and the Red Weasel turned slowly to face him.

  "Why dost thou be laughing?" asked the Red Weasel.

  "N–nothing," Ramsey said, wheezing. "I just remembered a joke."

  "Gadzooks, then," said Belmak. "Verily," he added. With a last suspicious look, he turned back around. The Red Weasel followed suit, then they both set off once more, awkward as toddlers in snowsuits. Ramsey ambled after them, wiping at his eyes, still in danger of collapsing back into giggles, and so was not aware of the stone horse trough standing in the road until he smacked it with his knee.

  As Ramsey hopped and swore, Belmak paused to observe. "It is a dangerous city, Madrikhor," he commented.

  "Yes," the Red Weasel agreed a moment later. "Forsooth."

  After following the two adventurers for over an hour, at an incredibly slow pace that Ramsey felt sure he could have improved on walking backward, their odd inability seemed nowhere near as charming. Catur Ramsey found himself fighting irritation with every plodding step.

  Just my luck this Gardiner kid wasn't into science fiction. Why couldn't he have been obsessed with some scenario where everyone had little personal atomic rocket-cars or something?

  As midnight approached, the city was no less lively than during the daylight hours, but had merely taken on a different kind of life. In a virtual world full of thieves, murderers, and practitioners of black magic, and with many of them the alter egos of people who were up past their bedtimes, it was no surprise if Madrikhor changed as darkness fell from faux-Medieval heartiness to febrile mock-Gothic. It was hard to find a shadowy spot without someone hiding in it, a dark corner where someone was not conducting a transaction or a betrayal just beyond the glow of the streetlamp. The shapes that hurr
ied past along the windy streets wore billowing cloaks, but the outlines that could be seen were fantastical, and many of the eyes glinting from deep hoods shone with a light that did not seem particularly human.

  It's more like Halloween than anything else, Ramsey thought. Like Halloween every night of the year. Although he was tired and beginning to get cranky, he could not entirely disapprove. One of the few consistent things about his childhood had been the holidays, which had a certain sameness no matter where his family had celebrated them. Sometimes they had been living in an actual neighborhood instead of on a military base, and those Halloweens had been the best of all.

  A dark, cape-flapping figure leaped across the alley above his head, from one rooftop to another, and he suddenly missed those Halloweens, the happy terror of well-known streets gone dark and mysterious, of familiar faces made strange by masks and makeup. He found himself wishing he had been more interested in things like role-playing when he was a kid, that he had found a place like the Middle Country when he had still had the trick of immersive belief. Now he could only be a tourist. Like Wendy and her siblings growing up and losing Never-Never Land, he had gone beyond the point where he could get back, but he could come close enough to feel something of loss.

  If The Reaver's Posset had been in one of Madrikhor's less prepossessing neighborhoods, it was a beauty spot compared to the place Belmak and the Weasel now led him. They were not even truly in the city anymore, but had wandered out into a kind of extended poverty-village, miles long, whose houses appeared to be built of the flimsiest and least valuable materials, and which huddled against each other like the cells of a beehive someone had sat on.

  "What the hell is this, Beezle?" he whispered. "Where are we now?"

  "Hangtown. Orlando didn't come here much."

  "It's a ghetto!"

  "That's what you get with laissez-faire economies, even the imaginary kind."

  Ramsey blinked, wondering if he had discovered a socialist bias in Beezle's programming. "It is dangerous?"

  "As far as this gameworld goes," the bug replied, "what isn't? But yeah, it's not real nice. Zombies, dark kobolds, lots of thieves and cutthroats down on their luck, of course. I think they have some kind of a werewolf problem out near the dump, too."

  Ramsey made a face and quietly drew Slamheller or whatever it was called out of its scabbard.

  Belmak paused long enough to deliver the message, "Fear not, we are almost there."

  "Yea," added his companion, "and verily." They both sounded out of breath.

  Beezle's remark about werewolves came back as it became more and more clear to Ramsey that he was being led to what could only be the aforementioned dump, a mountain of rubbish with several dependent foothills that covered the equivalent of several city blocks in the middle of Hangtown. Fires smoldered everywhere, most of them spontaneous ignitions in the rubbish. The medieval trash was genuinely dispiriting, even for a virtual environment, the preponderant articles being muck and bones and broken pots. Except for a few figures scavenging among the piles, barely visible even by the red light of the low flames, the area was deserted; Ramsey could see no reason he should be brought to such a place.

  He lifted the sword whose name he could never remember. "Is this an ambush or something? If so, I wish you would have pulled it off a few miles back and saved us all this walking."

  "No . . . ambush," said the Red Weasel, clearly even more winded than Ramsey. "The place . . . lies yonder." The red-haired man pointed to a dark clump at the base of one of the rubbish hills; from Ramsey's perspective it looked like just another pile of trash, but as he squinted he saw something moving in front of it, dimly outlined by fireglow. He lifted the sword before him and began marching across the spongy ground. Belmak and his small companion could not keep up the pace and fell behind; within moments they were barely visible.

  The clump turned out to be a cottage, if a word so often used in fairy tales could be applied to a structure that was little more than a shed made of old boards and chunks of broken stone. Rags stuffed in the cracks to keep out the wind, or perhaps the ubiquitous dirty smoke, gave it the appearance of a doll losing its stuffing. Standing in the opening (which would have been the doorframe if there had been a door) was a tall figure wearing, as did so many in this city, a long black cloak with a hood.

  Ramsey strode determinedly toward this apparition. He'd been online about two hours longer than he'd planned already, his feet were hurting, and if he waited much longer he was going to miss even the chance to get take-out food from the place downstairs. It was time to get some answers and then, if this new venture was as pointless as he suspected, get out of the simworld.

  "So here I am," he said to the silent shape. "Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee are back there a ways, but they'll be coming up before long. I've walked a damn long way for this, so who are you and what information have you got to sell?"

  For a long moment the dark figure was statue-still. "You forget yourself," it said then, the voice deep and impressive. "No one speaks thusly to the great enchanter . . . Dreyra Jarh!" The stranger threw his arms up in the air; as the sleeves billowed around long, pale hands, lightning turned the entire Hangtown dump into a flash-photograph. Thunder exploded overhead, making Catur Ramsey's ears pop.

  In the pinwheeling dark after the bright light, Ramsey made a dizzy try at finding his balance, managing it finally by using the sword in his hand as the third leg of the tripod. His initial alarm was ebbing swiftly. "Yeah, that's pretty good," he said aloud. He could not see well enough yet to make out his adversary, so he hoped he was facing in the right direction. "And that was probably a pretty expensive trick—probably cost you a month's allowance, or a few weeks' worth of running around here collecting bonus points or whatever. But if you had more than one or two tricks like that, I don't think you'd be out here in the middle of nowhere, now would you? You'd have a place like that big old wizard's castle I saw the other day."

  Dreyra Jarh paused, then slowly pulled back his hood, exposing a shaved head and a long thin face of corpselike whiteness. "Okay, Gardiner, you win. Let's talk."

  Gardiner? Ramsey was about to explain, then thought better of it. "Yeah, let's talk."

  The house of Dreyra Jarh, Ramsey decided, was probably one of the few realistic examples of actual Medieval Living to be found in all of the Middle Country. The ambience was not improved by the dried, flattened cakes of manure which the enchanter used to keep his fire stoked, but under the circumstances such fuel made sense: this was not a society which would have paper or even wood to throw away. He hoped it was not also an omen about the quality of Dreyra Jarh's information.

  Perhaps in a last effort at one-upsmanship, the enchanter had settled onto the only seat in the one-room shanty, a tall but rickety stool, leaving Ramsey to settle on the floor—or more precisely, on the flat, pounded earth. The firelight revealed a tiny, spade-shaped beard of sky-blue on the end of Dreyra Jarh's chin, a foppish detail that suggested he had once seen better days, or at least that the person behind the character lavished more time on his grooming than his home furnishings.

  "Beezle," Ramsey murmured without moving his lips, "have you ever heard of this guy? Why does he think I'm Orlando?"

  "Heard of him? Hell, yeah, I've heard of him. He and Thargor have had more run-ins than you could count, but he used to be doin' a lot better than this. He used to have a whole country, y'know? Like, he owned it. That's when he was the Wizard-King of Andarwen. But he lost that to some demon in a dice game. The last time Thargor bumped into him, he still had a big old estate, and everything on it—servants, pack of hounds, you name it—was made out of living glass." Beezle considered for a moment. "I'd say he's had some hard times since then."

  Ramsey could not suppress a snort. "I guess so."

  "You are Orlando Gardiner, aren't you?" The enchanter, for all his bony, hardened look, sounded almost plaintive. He had a slight accent, something Catur Ramsey couldn't quite put his finger on. "I'll put a Tabl
e of Judgment seal on everything that happens in this room if you want. Dupping not, swear I won't tell. But I need to know."

  Ramsey hesitated, but he knew that even after weeks of investigation, he could not lie convincingly enough about this environment to pull off the deception. "No, I'm not. I've just been asking around about his character, Thargor."

  "Damn!" Dreyra Jarh stood up and stamped in frustration. "Locking mother of uttermost damn it all!"

  "So that's why you brought me out here?" Ramsey asked when the other had calmed a little. "Just because you thought I was Orlando Gardiner?"

  "Yes," said the wizard sullenly. "Sorry." The apology didn't sound very convincing.

  After walking a half-dozen virtual miles through some of the least charming sights that Madrikhor had to offer, Ramsey was not going to be put off so easily. "What did you want to say to him?"

  The thin face turned suspicious. "Nothing."

  "Look, I'm not just interested in Thargor, I'm interested in Orlando Gardiner, too. I'm working for his family—doing some investigating."

  "Working for his family? Why?"

  "First off, I'm the one asking questions—and here's why." Ramsey took a clinking purse out of his tunic. He had only planned to make it stretch through another couple of fact-finding missions, anyway. "I'll give you this if you help me out. All of it—twenty gold emperors."

  "Imperials." But the wizard who had once ruled an entire nation was obviously interested. "Just to talk to you?"

  "As long as you're reasonably interesting." Ramsey set the money-sack beside his knee. "Tell me if he says anything obviously false, Beezle, will you?" he murmured. Aloud, he asked, "Why did you want to talk to Orlando Gardiner?"

  Dreyra Jarh settled back onto his stool, long hands draped in his lap. "Well, he's been around a long time, like me. We've been enemies, kind of. . . ."