Jake scrambled to his feet just in time to meet the other attacker. Steel rang against steel as their swords met. The henchman gave a savage twist of his arm, seeking to trap Jake’s sword with his own weapon’s sharply hooked end. Jake danced to the side, twisting his blade free and prepared an upward swing that would disembowel his opponent if he could get there before the man could block.
Just then a horrible spasm jolted his entire body. From the corner of his eye, Jake saw Des’s body jerking and writhing in place as flickering bolts of brilliant blue electricity coursed and flashed all over his body. Wave after wave of lightning shook the boys, lifting them into the air with their backs arched in agony. Jake’s teeth ground together uncontrollably, jaws clenching against the fiery pain. His lungs refused to suck in air and fear swelled within him.
Just when he was sure he would lose consciousness, the magical electrocution ceased. The crackling bolts of energy vanished as instantly as they had begun, and Jake fell painfully to the ground. Through hazy eyes blurred with tears of pain, Jake could see Alys wielding a pair of silvery daggers before her, points aimed at him and Des. Rage boiled over in his heart, and Jake forced himself shakily to his feet with a wordless roar of challenge.
Lunging for the last remaining attacker, Jake drove the man back with hacking swings of his sword. The man staggered back, unprepared for Jake’s ferocity. He tried awkwardly to block, but Jake knocked the hooked sword aside with a swing so powerful the weapon was torn from his opponent’s hands. The hireling, face filled with terror, fell back another step but Jake shoved his sword forward, impaling the man through the stomach.
Meanwhile, Des leapt to his feet. Seeing Jake’s maddened frenzy lent Des a newfound courage as the two men chasing him charged from either side. Des ducked and dodged, imagining himself on the ten yard line with the ball in hand. He threw himself into a looping somersault, passing right over the shoulders of one of the diving attackers, and rolled nimbly to his feet a few yards away.
The two men collided on the ground where he’d been standing a moment before. Des fired an arrow, but the larger of the two men knocked it aside with a bracer-covered arm as he climbed back to his feet. The brute motioned for his disoriented companion to stay back, and stormed toward Des with his sword held high.
Des grabbed his last arrow from the quiver at his back, gripping it near the middle of the shaft. The henchman bore down on him, a murderous light in his eyes as he chopped downward with the wickedly hooked sword. Des dropped to his knees leaning to one side, and shoved upwards with the tightly-gripped arrow with both hands. The steel point slid through the hireling’s leather armor and pierced flesh. Blood welled up, quickly spilling over Des’s hands as he drove the arrow deeper into his larger assailant.
The murderous light went out of the man’s eyes, and his dead weight threatened to collapse on Des. The thief shoved him aside, rolling in the other direction.
“Got ya!” he crowed, climbing to his feet.
The two men who had stayed out of the fighting, flanking Alys on either side, looked around the clearing at their fallen comrades. As one, they threw down their weapons and fled into the trees. Alys sneered after them, shouting that they were cowards. The giant Torin watched them go without a word, still gripping Kari with both muscled arms.
“Now it’s your turn!” shouted Jake, leveling his sword straight out in front of his chest to point squarely at the dagger-wielding sorceress. He glanced over at Des, hoping the thief would know what to do, and then charged.
Without a word, Alys raised her silvery daggers again. She held them overhead with the short, sinuous blades crossed. The spiky-haired sorceress began spinning in place, a circle of light forming above her as the dagger’s points seemed to carve a trail of glowing yellow fire in the air itself. Spinning faster, the circle grew brighter.
Jake honed in on her, intent on reaching Alys before she could finish the spell. If only he could make it…
Alys’s feet lifted off the ground and her body twirled like a top. She uncrossed the daggers, spreading her arms to either side. Trailing scars of fire followed, leaving brilliant loops of blinding light all around the woman’s body.
There was a deep, cracking sound like a massive boulder splitting in half. It was so loud and low pitched that Jake felt the shock more than heard it. At the same moment, a wave of pure darkness exploded outward from where Alys hovered. The nearby pack-horses whinnied in terror, prancing and rearing up on their hind legs. Jake barreled forward, charging straight into the blinding wall of blackness.
Two steps in, the darkness dissipated like thick mist burned away by the sun. Wisps of greasy black smoke drifted in vague circles all around him before they, too, faded from existence. Where Alys, Torin, and Kari had been there was nothing. Jake’s momentum carried him forward, throwing him off balance so that he crashed to his hands and knees in the exact spot Torin had held Kari captive just a moment before.
He looked over at Des, shaking his head in stunned defeat.
Kari and her captors had vanished.
Chapter 17
Jake pounded his fist angrily on the ground. “We had them!”
Hobbling over to him, Des knelt in the grass beside his armored friend. “I know,” he said, draping one arm across Jake’s shaking shoulders. He sighed heavily. “At least we finally found Kari. We know she’s still in Xaloria.”
“Right,” said Jake, drawing a deep breath and letting it out slowly as he turned it over in his mind. “Okay, so we know she’s here for sure, and now we have some idea of who’s holding her hostage. What we don’t know is what they’re after, what they want her for. Or where they’ve gone.”
“But we have to get her back somehow,” Des said quietly, turning away from Jake to hide the hopeless expression he could not keep from his face. Then his eyebrows shot up and he grabbed Jake’s arm, pointing toward the horizon. “Look!”
Jake turned his eyes to the familiar spot just over the curving horizon. The sky was an empty blue scudded with fluffy, cotton-ball clouds. Jake blinked, taking a moment to realize what Des was pointing to. Or rather, what Des was not pointing to. The green – and occasionally red-stained – horizontal bars that displayed their health points were no longer there.
“Where are our points?” Des asked in a shaking voice. He jumped to his feet and spun around in a circle, frantically searching the low sky all around them. “Nowhere,” he cried, sounding panicked. “Nowhere! And when we were fighting, there were no hit points showing up.”
Jake nodded. He had noticed it too, but in the thick of battle had been unable to comprehend what it meant. He considered the revelation for a moment. “My arm,” he told Des. “When we fought the crolorg, and it speared my arm. It really hurt.”
“Well, yeah,” Des started to say, and then his eyes grew so wide Jake would have laughed if he wasn’t scared out of his mind. “You mean it really hurt?” Des asked in a hoarse, frightened whisper. “And I’m covered with bruises. Jake…are we actually getting hurt? Not just losing life points, but for real?”
Jake clenched his teeth as he climbed painfully to his feet, reaching up to unlatch his chainmail halberd. “Help me get this off.”
With Des’s help, Jake pulled the various pieces of armor from his upper body to reveal his battered torso. Angry red welts had formed on his sides, and circular impressions from where the mail had been driven into his skin were spotted with tiny wells of blood. Worst of all was the area around his wounded arm; though the wound seemed healed earlier, the edges were red with a yellow tinge that turned Jake’s stomach upside down.
“That’s not life points,” Des said, still whispering. Jake shook his head, swallowing a thick lump in his throat. “They really hurt us,” Des went on. “Not just playing. What if it gets worse. Jake, what if we die and then instead of starting over at the spawn point we’re just…”
“Stop it!” Jake said sharply, pausing where he had begun replacing his armor. “Freaking out about
it won’t do us any good.”
Des opened his mouth to say something angry, but Jake held up a hand and spoke over him. “Sorry. But look, I’m scared too. This is really, really bad. And it’s all my fault somehow. But I need your help to fix it, and we’re not going to get anywhere if we’re too scared to fight a couple hired mercenaries. I guess we just have to try and not think about it.”
“Not think about it?” Des repeated incredulously. “Jake, we are not legendary heroes of a mythical realm. I don’t want to die.”
“Me neither,” said Jake. He reached out with both hands, placing them on Des’s shoulders as he peered pleadingly into his friend’s eyes. “And neither does Kari.”
The reminder hit home. Des rubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand, lowering his head in shame. “You’re right.” He looked back up at Jake, and some of the old Des returned. “And, hey, man, it’s not all your fault. Remember, someone’s messing with your program. Whoever has us trapped here, it’s his fault. What did she call him…the Prime?”
Jake drew in a sharp breath. He had almost forgotten about the Prime. Whoever that was. Could it be another NPC? Then he remembered Ryden’s warning about an invading force from another dimension. Prime?
“Okay,” he said. “So it’s Prime’s fault. We’ve got to find him and then think of a way to make him let us all go home. You, me…and Kari.”
Des nodded, reaching out to clasp Jake’s hand in a tight, brotherly grip. “All of us,” the two boys said together, an oath they both intended to keep.
They kept their hands together, looking into one another’s eyes to seal the promise. Then they let go, and Jake looked around them at the abandoned forest clearing.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get it figured out. Can you remember what they were talking about, before we got here?”
Des dropped his eyes to the ground, brow wrinkling in concentration. “The big one, he said something about how they shouldn’t have come back. So they’d been here before.”
“That’s right,” said Jake, snapping his fingers. “He said she didn’t know what it was before, and then a few minutes later they called Kari the Interpreter. ’What was she supposed to interpret, though?”
The two boys cast their eyes about the trampled grass of the clearing, searching for something they hoped they would know when they saw it.
“It has to be around here somewhere,” Jake reasoned.
“Maybe Kari’s the only one who can see it,” suggested Des. “Or maybe she had some magic item that would let her interpret it, whatever it is.”
“Good idea,” said Jake, and started for the red tent that was the only remaining sign that anyone else had been here. The bodies had all faded away, erased by the game’s AI now that they were no longer active. Des followed, holding up the flap to let the light in as Jake examined the inner room. Piled pillows against one wall formed a low pallet for sleeping, a single blanket tangled and discarded atop the pile. A cushioned folding chair sat in another corner, facing a collapsible oaken desk which held a few scattered papers and scraps of parchment covered in sketches and indecipherable notes scrawled in a cramped, spidery handwriting Jake couldn’t make sense of.
He examined the notes closely anyway, tracing the rows of illegible symbols with his thumb. It certainly wasn’t Kari’s handwriting, but there was something about it that seemed familiar. Jake frowned, his brow furrowed in thought.
“I should know who wrote this,” he said, lifting his eyes to look at Des with naked frustration. “I’ve seen it before, I know I have! I just can’t think of where!”
Des let the tent flap fall and crossed the narrow room formed by the slanting fabric walls to stand at Jake’s shoulder. In the tinted light that penetrated the walls, he looked down at the parchment clutched in Jake’s hand and shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. Reaching out a hand, he traced one finger along a column of number-like figures. “But I can tell you what it says. These are coordinates, and these over on this side are timestamps. It’s exactly how my football program keeps track of plays.”
Jake squinted at the figures Des had indicated, cocking his head to one side. Almost, the figures did look like numbers. As he stared hard at the parchment, willing the message to reveal itself to him, his vision began to blur and suddenly he saw it. It was like it had only been out of focus, and now he could read the same numbers Des had seen.
“You’re right!” Jake struggled to keep his eyes focused on the numbers long enough to read them all. “These are VR system timestamps. I’ve seen them in the error logs. Eleven digits, so that’s days, hours, minutes, seconds, and hundredths of seconds. “
“And look,” said Des, pointing to another line of figures. “Fourth from the bottom. I’m not sure anymore, but that should be the timestamp for yesterday afternoon at two twenty-six and thirty-two point nine four seconds. And it lines up with the coordinates here…” Des slid his finger across the page, pointing to another grouping of digits.
Letting Des take hold of the parchment, Jake dug out his magical map. Unfolding it, he found the orange blips representing himself and Des and centered them on the map. Then he requested a coordinate display. When the numbers flashed at the top of his magic map, Jake compared them to the numbers on the parchment.
“We’re right on top of it,” he said. So whatever it was, it happened right here but yesterday. They must have come here when it happened, that’s why he said Kari didn’t know before.”
Lowering the map, Jake looked at Des with a slowly spreading grin. “All we have to do is find the next one, and beat them to it. What’s the next timestamp that hasn’t happened yet?”
“Well…” Des looked at the parchment again. “Here, there’s one almost exactly two days after the last one…so, tomorrow. Assuming time doesn’t go all crazy on us again. I mean, what if a thousand years goes by in the next ten minutes. Whoever’s against us did it once, apparently, so couldn’t they do that again? Seems like a pretty good way of getting rid of us.”
“No,” Jake shook his head. “Then this Prime character would miss the next event too. Besides, system time is fixed to the actual hardware. Maybe the coordinates are too, I’m not sure, but the time is. A thousand years, or a hundred thousand years, tomorrow will always be tomorrow.”
“Great.” Des wiped a hand across his brow. “One thing we don’t have to worry about then. So we know where they’re going next, and when they’re going to be there. We just need to figure out why.”
The two boys started going through the notes again, but the scribbled parchments offered little insight into the minds of Kari’s NPC captors. One peculiar drawing caught Jake’s attention. He picked it up from among the others on the wooden desk, puzzled. It was a pencil sketch, an elongated symbol of some kind like a plus sign with a loop at the top. Looking over the other pages scattered on the desk, he saw the symbol repeated on most of them, though never as large as it was on the paper he now held.
“This looks like a hieroglyph,” he mused, then snapped his fingers as he recognized it from Ms. Johns’Ancient History classes. “It’s an ankh. It’s a symbol that stands for life. We learned all about it when we were studying ancient Egypt.”
Des scrunched up his face. “History class,” he said, making the words sound as if they had left a sour taste in his mouth. “I was never any good there. What’s it doing in your game?”
“I used a whole bunch of hieroglyphs when I was designing the first module for Xaloria,” Jake said, thinking back to the earliest days of the project. As a matter of fact, the idea for Xaloria itself had grown out of the VR-based project on Ancient Egypt he’d done for Ms. Johns’class. “No, the real question is what’s it doing in these notes? Look, it shows up on almost every page. What’s so important about the ankh?”
“Weird,” Des agreed, but it was clear he did not see any solution. “I guess it means something, but what?”
Jake started to shake his head, starting to feel frustrated
again. Just when it seemed like they were getting somewhere, another brick wall slammed down in his face. He was starting to feel like his whole life was going to be that way. Just when he got used to his situation, started to feel his way around and figure out how to live with it, something else would come along and screw everything up. Like his mother, bringing Gerald into his life just when he’d finally started to accept Leiner Hills. Like this incomprehensible mystery staring him in the face just when he thought he’d been about to rescue Kari. Jake’s hands clenched into fists. He was about to say a word his mother would be very disappointed by when inspiration struck him.
“That’s what they were looking for!” he shouted, throwing the parchment down on the table and running back out of the tent. Confused, Des followed after him shouting for Jake to wait up a minute.
“Help me look,” called Jake as Des came out of the tent. Jake ran over to the edge of the stream and bent over, staring into the water. “It could be anywhere. Under the water, in the rocks, carved in a tree.”
“What could be?” Des asked, feeling lost.
Jake stood up straight and turned to look at him, his face suddenly elated. “The ankh!” He motioned for Des to join him atop a large boulder that squatted over the stream, half buried in the riverbank and jutting out a few inches over the shallow water. Jake and Des looked down in awe. Through the clear water, thousands of tiny, dark pebbles colored the creek bed. The bottom was a gray mosaic broken beneath their vantage point by a pattern of lighter-colored stones arranged together. The design stretched from one side of the gray creek-bed to the other, a mosaic within the greater mosaic. The lighter colored pebbles formed a giant, white ankh that seemed to shimmer beneath the surface.
“Incredible,” Jake murmured.
Des pumped his fist in the air joyfully. “Alright!” he shouted. “That’s it, then! That’s why they came here, to see this thing.”
Game Alive: A Science Fiction Adventure Novel Page 11