Eventually she came up onto her hands and knees and made use of the paper towels.
Then she escaped.
During college she’d rented a house with some other girls. The kitchen drain kept getting clogged. They didn’t have money to hire a plumber. Zula had not grown up on an Iowa farm for nothing. The key thing you had to know was that the pipe nuts that held drain traps in place, though they looked huge and immovable, were generally applied finger-tight, since all that was necessary was to compress an internal O-ring around the pipe, and cranking it down with a wrench would not make it seal any better, in fact would only inflict damage.
The plumber who had installed the drain trap to which Zula had been chained had stronger hands than Zula did, but she was eventually able to move the nuts and yank out the U-bend.
She piled the loose chain into her shoulder bag and then slung that over her shoulder.
She then climbed up on a toilet and from there to the top of one of the partitions between the stalls and moved a ceiling tile aside. She had a flashlight in her bag—another Iowa-farm-girl residual habit—and used it to look around for whatever it was that had made Sokolov so concerned when he had first seen it.
This was not totally obvious at first, and so she clambered up into the space above the ceiling and got a grip on one of those zigzaggy trusses and used it to crab-walk away from the safe house and toward the core of the building. The elevator shafts were nearby, but they were clad in concrete and there was no obvious way to get inside of them; even if she had been able to do so, it wasn’t clear how that would have helped her.
When she was certain that she must have passed beyond the limits of the ladies’ room, she reached down, pried up a ceiling tile, and looked into the space below. It seemed to be a utility corridor, dark at the moment.
She let herself down onto the upper surface of the metal grid in which the ceiling tiles were fixed. This supported her weight but was destroyed in the process: the flimsy extrusions bent downward and the adjoining tiles folded and cracked. It didn’t matter. She got a grip on the ruined grid and let herself down until her feet were dangling maybe three feet above the floor, then let herself drop.
As she had guessed from looking at the arrangement of the concrete verticals passing through the ceiling space, the fire stairway was just on the other side of a wall, and all she had to do, in order to get into it, was to exit from this corridor into the elevator lobby and then pass through an adjoining door. During those few moments she would be in clear view of any guard who was posted at the reception desk of the safe house—but she knew that at least four of the seven security consultants were deployed outside the building, and she hoped that the desk might be unattended. It was easy enough to check this by pushing the door open slightly and peering through the crack.
No one was there. Deeper inside the suite she could see other security consultants pacing around, talking on phones, ransacking their luggage, but no one was looking out into the elevator lobby.
She exited, made two strides across the polished marble floor, opened the doorway to the fire stairs, and slipped in. Restraining the urge to just make a break for it, she used her butt to soften the closure of the door. Then she began to descend the stairway as fast as she could with twenty pounds of chain jangling in the bag around her neck and one end of it cuffed to her ankle.
The descent of forty-three floors gave her plenty of time to think about this in a way she hadn’t when she had just made the decision to do it. To the extent she’d thought about it at all, she had been thinking, What would Qian Yuxia do? or perhaps, What would Qian Yuxia think of me if she could see me curled up on the floor sobbing like a little girl?
Until now her complicity in all of this had been based on a certain kind of unspoken bargain that had been struck between her and Ivanov, a bargain that amounted to “we are treating you badly and will probably kill you but we could treat you a lot worse and we could kill you sooner.” Not much of a bargain, but then she hadn’t had much choice in negotiating the terms. The way she had been sucked into this terrible situation was bad enough, but the thought that she was now partly responsible for getting Yuxia ensnared in it too was intolerable.
In theory, Peter was being held hostage and might be answerable for her escape, but she doubted it. Peter had gone over to the other side. He was being useful to them. Killing him wouldn’t get her back. And as for Csongor—she hoped nothing bad would happen to Csongor, but she was also entitled to think of herself and her own survival.
Which was all she was thinking of when she hit the bottom of the stairwell, rounded a corner at speed, and caromed off a man who was standing right there for some reason. She spun away from him instinctively. He grabbed at her but had to settle for her shoulder bag. She left it in his grasp and kept running, the chain dragging out behind her as it uncoiled from the bag.
Then her leg was yanked out from under her, spinning her back and around as she fell so that, as she went down on the concrete floor, she could see a man standing twenty feet away, holding her empty shoulder bag, one foot stomped down on the end of the chain.
Sokolov.
He picked up the end of the chain. With his free hand he then made a one-word call on his mobile phone.
And then back up to the ladies’ room where the chain was detached from Sokolov, passed up into the ceiling space, and padlocked around a cast-iron pipe six inches in diameter.
RICHARD WAS IN the hammerbeam hall of a red sandstone castle on the Isle of Man, being announced by D-squared’s herald in a language that sounded vaguely French.
Once again his arrival had been unexpected (though not, as it turned out, unheralded). This time, the element of surprise was down to a backup that had developed in D-squared’s email pipeline. Don Donald used email when he was at Cambridge and when he was traveling, but he had banned Internet in his castle, and even installed a phone jammer in the dovecote. He came here to read, to write, to drink, to dine, and to have conversations, none of which activities could be improved by electronic devices. And yet he had this awkward problem that much of his livelihood was derived from T’Rain. And even though he did not play the game himself, professing to find the very ideal “frightful,” he couldn’t really ply that trade without communicating rather frequently with people at Corporation 9592.
Richard had once looked D-squared up on Wikipedia and learned that he was a laird or an archduke or something. This castle, however, was not his ancestral demesne. He had bought it, cash on the barrelhead. At first his staff had made use of a trailer parked outside its south bastion, placed there to serve as a portable office for the contractors who were fixing the place up. It was equipped with Internet and a laser printer on which emails that merited the attention of the lord of the manor could be printed up on A4 paper and conducted into the donjon in a leather wallet. Later the white paper was discontinued in favor of light brown pseudoparchment. This was a simple matter of taste. Modern paper, with its eye-searing 95 percent albedo, simply ruined the look that was slowly coming together inside the walls. The sans-serif typefaces were swapped out for faux-ancient ones. But it was not as if a man of Donald Cameron’s erudition could be taken in by a scripty-looking typeface chosen by an assistant from Word’s mile-long font menu. And the style and content of these messages from Seattle were every bit as jarring as the paper they were printed on. A medievalist, he quite liked being in a medieval frame of mind; in fact, had to be, in order to write. Sitting in his tower “with prospects, on a fair day, west to Donaghadee and north to Cairngaan,” writing with a dip pen at a thousand-year-old desk, he entered into a flow state whose productivity was rivaled only by that of Devin Skraelin. Suddenly to be confronted by a hard copy of an email in which a twenty-four-year-old Seattleite with a nose ring wrote something like “we r totally stressing out cuz chapter 27 is not resonating with 16 yo gamer demographic” was, to say the least, inimical to progress. Some way needed to be devised for important communications to get through to
him without disturbing the requisite ambience.
Fortunately he had, without really trying, attracted a coterie of people who, depending on the point of view of the observer, might have been described as hangers-on, lackeys, squatters, parasites, or acolytes. They were of divers ages and backgrounds, but all of them shared D-squared’s fascination with the medieval. Some were blue-collar autodidacts who had made their way up through the ranks of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and others had multiple Ph.D.s and were fluent in extinct dialects. They had begun to show up at his doorstep, or rather his portcullis, when word had got out that he was considering the possibility of turning some parts of the castle into a reenactment site as a way to generate a bit of coin and to keep the castle from falling victim to the subtle but annihilating hazards of desuetude. In those days the plan had been to maintain a sort of firewall between the part of the manor where he lived and the part where the reenactment was to happen. But a few years’ experience had taught him that as long as one paid a bit of attention to weeding out the drunks and the mental defectives, the sorts of people who were willing to live in medieval style 24/7 were just the ones he needed to have around.
As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead or ale (brewed on-site, of course) they had managed to convince him that the medieval world wasn’t worse or more primitive than the modern, just different.
And so the email pipeline now worked like this: down in Douglas, which was the primary city of the Isle of Man, the girlfriend of one of the medievalists, who dwelled in a flat there (“I happen to rather like tampons”), would read D-squared’s email as it came in, filter out the obvious junk, and print out a hard copy of anything that seemed important, and zip it up in a waterproof messenger bag. When it came time to walk her dog, she would stroll up the waterfront promenade until she reached the wee elven train station at its northern end, where she would hand the bag to the station agent, who would later hand it over to the conductor of the narrow-gauge electrical train that wound its way from there up into the interior of the island. At a certain point along the line it would be tossed out onto the siding and later picked up by D-squared’s gamekeeper, who would carry it up the hill and place its contents on the desk of the in-house troubadour, who would translate it into medieval Occitan and then sing and/or recite it to D-squared at mealtime. The lord of the manor would then dictate a response that would follow the reverse route back down the hill to the girlfriend’s laptop and the Internet.
Ludicrous? Yes. All done with a straight face? Of course not. Having taken a few meals there, Richard could tell, from the reactions of those present—at least, the ones who understood Occitan—that the troubadour was a laff riot. Much of the laughter seemed to be at the expense of American cubicle fauna who thought in Power-Point and typed with their thumbs, and so Richard was now careful to phrase all his emails to Don Donald in such a way as to make it clear that he was on to the joke.
The one in which he’d announced his imminent arrival at IOM was still being translated.
And yet for Don Donald to receive a surprise visit was much less of a problem than it was for Skeletor. This was the medieval world. Communications were miserable. Most visits were surprise visits. As long as the visitors didn’t have poleaxes or buboes, it was fine. There was plenty of room in the castle, and there were buffers in place, which was to say, servant-reenactors, who made Richard and Pluto comfortable as word percolated inward to the donjon. When D-squared next descended his perilous, zillion-year-old stone spiral staircase to the hall to take a meal, Richard and Pluto were announced, courteously and a bit pompously, by the herald—actually (since the place was a bit understaffed) a man who shuttled among the roles of Herald, Brewer, and Third Drunk.
“THERE MIGHT BE a need to confer extraordinary powers upon the Earthtone Coalition,” Richard proposed.
Don Donald leaned back in his chair and began messing around with his pipe. When Richard had been a boy, all men had smoked pipes. Now, as far as he could discern, D-squared was the only pipe smoker remaining in the entire world.
“To keep them from being wiped out, you’re saying.”
“Yes.”
“How could such a thing be done,” D-squared wondered, biting his pipe stem and squinting at something above Richard’s right shoulder, “without ratifying an invidious distinction?”
“Are you speaking Occitan? Because I have to tell you that between the jet lag and the delicious claret—”
“There is no basis in the game world,” said D-squared, “for any of what has happened during the last four months. Town guards, military units, raiding parties fissured, without warning, into two moieties, at daggers drawn. Or perhaps I should say dagger drawn since, if the reports I’ve heard are to be credited, a good many of what you call the Earthtone Coalition found themselves suddenly and inexplicably in Limbo with particolored bodkins in their backs.”
“There’s no doubt it was a well-planned Pearl Harbor–ish kind of event,” Richard said.
“And many of your customers appear to be having great fun with it. Bully for them. But it poses a problem, doesn’t it, in that this extraordinary fission of the society is in no way justified, prefigured, even hinted at, in any of the Canon that Mr. Skraelin and I and the other writers have supplied.”
D-squared’s feelings were hurt, and he didn’t care who knew it. He went on, “I daresay you ought to just roll it back. It is really a hack, isn’t it? As though someone hacked into your website and defaced it with childish scrawlings. When such a thing happens, you don’t incorporate the vandalism into your website. You set it to rights and carry on.”
“Too much has happened,” Richard said. “Since the beginning of the Wor we have registered a quarter of a million new players. Everything they know about the world and the game has been post-Wor. To roll the world back would be to unmake every single one of their characters.”
“So your strategy is to put your thumb on the scale. Grant special powers to the characters you’d see win. Like Athena with Diomedes.”
Richard shrugged. “It’s an idea. I am not here to lay stuff on you ex cathedra. This is a collaboration.”
“All I mean to say is that, if you help the Earthtone Coalition, then you are, implicitly, admitting that such a thing as the Earthtone Coalition exists. You are conferring legitimacy on this ridiculous distinction that has been created by mischief makers.”
“It was a groundswell. An enormous flocking behavior, a phase transition.”
“No respect shown for the integrity of the world.”
“All we can do,” Richard said, “is move faster than the other guys. Lunge ahead of them. Surprise them with just how cool, how adaptable we can be. Delight them by incorporating their creation into the Canon. Show them what we’re made of.”
“Well that puts me on the spot, doesn’t it? How can I decline, on those terms?”
“I apologize for my choice of words,” Richard said. “I am really not trying to corner you. But I do believe that with a bit of thought you could actually come up with something that you would not be so unhappy with.”
Don Donald looked like he was thinking about it.
“Otherwise, it’s just going to veer. Like an airplane with its control surfaces shot off.”
“Oh. I’m the empennage?”
Richard threw up his hands.
“The tail feathers on the arrow,” explained D-squared, “that make it fly straight. Made of quills. Like the ones—”
“That writers used to write with, I get it.”
“Trailing behind…”
“But guiding the warhead. Yup. Hey, are you a writer or something?”
D-squared chuckled forcibly.
“They want it,” Richard said.
“They didn’t at first. They were thrilled to be off on their own, making up their own story.”
“The players, you mean.”
“Yes. This was very clear in the chat rooms, the third-party websites. Now that’s faded. They’re saying they want some direction back, they want the story of the world to make sense again.”
Something occurred to Don Donald, and he jabbed the stem of his pipe at Richard. “What language do they speak, in these chat rooms? Is it all English?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’d like to know who these people are. The instigators, the ringleaders. Are they Asians?”
“That is a common misconception,” Richard said. “That the Asians, less fluent in English, less conversant with European mythology, don’t cotton to the sorts of stories and characters that you like to write—but they are attracted by bright colors.” He shook his head. “We have analyzed this to death. It’s completely without foundation. Between the Chinese, with their Confucian background, and the Japanese, they are second to no one in their respect and maybe even awe for COBS.”
“COBS?”
“Crusty Old Brown Stuff. Sorry.”
“Another one of your internal acronyms?”
“A whole department. When you go into the world—which you never do—but when you go, for example, to the hut of Galdoromin the Hermit, at the End of the Fell Path, and get past his two-headed wolf and go inside and look around, all that shit hanging on the walls was produced by COBS.” Richard decided not to share the fact that the decor of Galdoromin’s hut had been inspired by a T.G.I. Friday’s in Issaquah. “Top-level design happens in Seattle, but the detailed modeling of the actual stuff all happened in China. They did a great job of it too.”
Don Donald appeared to be thinking about it. Richard tried shutting up for a change. He drained his tankard and stepped out to the garderobe. Then, back with an idea: “I was sleeping on the plane and a line came into my head: ‘We’ve all been made fools of!’ Kind of reflected the whole way I felt about the Wor. But later I was thinking, Why not turn it around and put it into the mouths of those people we find most annoying?”
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