She lay there for several minutes just listening. Wondering whether Jahandar or one of the other men might bother to come and check on her. But nothing happened. She could hear Jahandar moving occasionally, but he was just shifting his position, standing up to stretch his legs, pacing around, stretching.
Moving as quietly as she could, she slid a hand down to the side of her thigh, slowly worried the pocket’s zipper open, found the key with her fingers, and drew it out. She brought it up to her neck, wrapped one hand around the padlock to muffle any mechanical clicking noises that might come out of it, and got the key inserted. The padlock snicked open, and she felt the chain go slack around her throat. Not exactly a surprise; but one of her nightmares had been that for some reason it would fail to work.
It was a mistake, in a way, to have done this. For now she was overcome by an almost physical longing to squirm out of this sleeping bag and make a run for it.
She seriously considered it until, far off in the darkness, she heard the hiss and snick of a lighter, Jahandar’s lungs filling with cigarette smoke.
If she got out, went to the end of the chain as if she had to use the toilet again, and then suddenly made a run for it, would he be able to put a bullet in her before she had vanished into the trees? As he sat up there on his perch, was he keeping her in his crosshairs the whole time or just hanging out with the rifle across his lap, keeping casual watch over the camp?
It seemed unlikely that he would be able to plug her on the first pull of the trigger, given that it was dark and that he would be surprised. But the mere fact that he might do so focused her attention. Even if he missed, he would wake the entire camp, and then thirteen men with flashlights and guns and good boots would be pursuing her. At least some of them were experienced in hunting and mountaineering. She’d have the choice between remaining still, in which case they could catch up with her and surround her, or moving, in which case she would make obvious crashing and twig-snapping noises.
From nearby, the sound of a long zipper, somewhat muffled. A sleeping bag, she guessed. Then a second long zipper, sharper. A tent being opened. The swish of someone sliding out of his bag. Probably going to take a leak. Footsteps. Someone made himself comfortable on a camp chair. Some plasticky clicking noises and then the whooshy, saccharine jingle made by Windows as it was booting up.
She rolled onto her stomach, propped herself up on her elbows, and opened the tent zipper a minute amount, worrying the pull upward one tooth at a time so as not to make noise. Peering out through the hole just made, she saw Jones, sitting in the camp chair about thirty feet away, his face ghastly in the light of the laptop’s screen. He screwed himself around in his chair, thrust out a leg, got a hand into a hip pocket, and pulled out something tiny which he inserted into the side of the machine: a thumb drive. And then he went to work.
Had he not been right there, wide awake, with a pistol strapped into his armpit, this would have been the most difficult decision in her life. As it was, she had little choice: she snapped the padlock shut again. Then she replaced the key in her pocket and zipped it securely closed.
Despair would have been reasonable. But she reminded herself, again and again, that they could not, all of them, remain together in this camp indefinitely. Most of them would soon be leaving, with only a skeleton crew to keep an eye on Zula, and then her odds would go up accordingly. Jahandar could not be expected to stay up all night, every night, keeping watch over the camp. Sooner or later Zakir’s turn would come up, and Zakir would fall asleep immediately.
So she tried to rest. Sleep did not seem realistic, but she could at least lie still and give her body an opportunity to relax muscles, digest food, and store energy.
She must have dozed off, since she was awakened by a tinny Arabic pop song coming from someone’s phone: an alarm, not an incoming call. There was no way for her to judge time, but it was definitely still dark and she didn’t feel that she had been out for very long. She heard shifting around from one of the tents and low voices.
Peering out through her spyhole, she saw Jones exactly as before. But now pools of light were bobbing and veering across the ground as Ershut and the white American Abdul-Ghaffar—emerged from one of the tents. Sharjeel crawled out from another and scurried over to Jones to suck up to him some more, but Jones, deeply involved in whatever he was doing, told him to bugger off. Gradually they formed a little circle on the ground, anchored by Jones looming above them as on a throne. Occasionally they shone their flashlights across her tent, and she had to resist the temptation to flinch away. There was no way that they could possibly see her through this tiny crevice in the zipper. They gathered around the stove, only a few yards from her tent, and began banging pots. She felt an absolutely ridiculous flash of annoyance that they were somehow invading her territory, making a mess of her kitchen. Strange how the mind worked. They filled a pot with water, lit the stove, began making tea, snacking on bananas from a grocery bag.
After everyone had come fully awake, Jones began to talk, saying everything in English and Arabic so that Abdul-Ghaffar could understand it. Sharjeel was another whose Arabic could use some improvement. But Jahandar spoke nothing but Pashtun and Arabic, so the conversation had to be bilingual.
Actually it was not a conversation so much as a briefing.
“It’s 3:30,” Jones said. “We’ll be under way in moments. I estimate half an hour to get there, half an hour to reconnoiter the place and get in and show him this.” He yanked the thumb drive out, held it up as if they could all see what was on it, then put it into the breast pocket of his shirt and smoothed a Velcro flap over it. “Then he’ll have to pack some items, I should imagine, which might take another half an hour, and then another half hour to get to the rendezvous point below. So figure we meet there at 5:30 and get under way. Sharjeel, give the men another hour to sleep. Wake her up at 4:00 so that when you rouse the men at 4:30, water will be hot and breakfast ready. That’s time for eating, for morning prayers, and for packing. Jahandar and Ershut will, inshallah, come up here at around 5:30 to let you know that we are ready to go; when you see them, lead the rest of the expedition down to the trail. Ershut, we may need to display her.”
A minute later Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, Ershut, and Jahandar got up and walked away into the woods, headed downhill into the mining complex, leaving Sharjeel the only one keeping watch over the camp. Zula was tempted to make a run for it then. But then she’d be bracketed between the aroused camp and Jones’s contingent. Not a good situation. After five thirty, though, most of these men would be gone for good, leaving her with only four guards, two of whom were incompetent. That would be the time to make a break for it.
To be precise, she needed to make her break during the interval between five thirty and whenever it was that they were supposed to kill her. No schedule had been set for that yet, or if it had, they’d been discreet enough to do it out of her hearing.
Even if they intended to keep her alive indefinitely, she had an obligation to get free as soon as possible. After the jet crash, with Jones’s gun in her face, she’d blurted out the one thing she could think of that might keep her alive. And she didn’t imagine that Richard or anyone else in the family would fault her for it. But soon, as consequence, Richard was going to be in their power; and if he ended up taking Jones down his usual pathway into northern Idaho, it would lead them straight to the cabin where Uncle Jake and his family lived. She was obligated to do whatever she could to help them out of the mess she’d put them in.
To bears, she added boots as something to be thinking about. Zakir was a big lumbering man, but Sayed the graduate student was a good inch shorter than Zula. She made up her mind to have a look at what was on his feet the next time he emerged from his tent.
LOTTERY DISCOUNTZ HAD now spent enough time loitering just above the lower reaches of the trading pit to give his owner a loose understanding of how it all worked. He’d been foxed, at first, by the fact that T’Rain was wired for sound. The easiest
way to communicate with characters in one’s immediate vicinity was simply to talk. But there was, in addition, an old-school chat interface. You could type little messages, like the Internet pioneers of yore, and they would appear in scrolling windows on the screens of anyone who was listening. It was plainly the case that Marlon and the rest of the da G shou couldn’t live without it. So the next time Csongor focused his attention on the money-trading pit, he experimented with turning on the chat interface. For one thing he’d noticed about the place was that, for a trading pit, it was strangely quiet. It was visually loud, and ridiculously active, but almost no one was speaking.
It all became clear when he interrogated the chat interface and discovered that there were no fewer than a dozen discrete channels to which he could listen here. Doing so, he was treated to waterfalls of jargon-laden statements in as many separate windows.
Snarph: WTS RG 50 BUX PP NOW
Opening a browser window atop his view of the game, he did some googling and learned how to translate such utterances: “WTS” meant “want to sell,” “RG 50” meant that the quantity for sale amounted to fifty or so pieces of Red Gold, “BUX” meant that Snarph’s player wanted American dollars (other commonly seen options being “EUR,” “LBS,” “YEN,” and “RMB”), “PP” meant that he wanted to clear the transaction using PayPal, and “NOW” meant the obvious.
Working laboriously from a translation key that he found on a wiki, he typed in
Lottery Discountz: WTS IG XX BUX WU 1HR
Which meant “I wish to exchange a yet-to-be-divulged amount of Indigold for dollars in about one hour, settling the transaction by means of a Western Union wire transfer.”
But he did not hit the return key, which would have broadcast the message to all the heavy-hitter gold buyers in the deepest recess of the pit—the channel into which he’d been typing. He, a complete nobody, was proposing to launch a transaction worth (at least) hundreds of thousands of dollars, using Indigold pieces that he did not actually have in hand yet. He had already seen other would-be sellers, making much less unusual propositions, being hounded down as mere mischief makers and slain on the spot. Worse yet—since death, in T’Rain, was only a temporary inconvenience—he might get exiled permanently.
So he waited and watched. Because there was an alternative to broadcasting on a channel: you could send the message privately to a specific individual. He only needed to find the right one. And now that he had discovered the chat interface and broken its code, he was beginning to feel he had some plausible hope of doing so. To begin with, he could ignore all the channels except the ones used by the highest of high rollers. Once he had closed all those windows, he began to look for lines that had the right sorts of codes in them. A particularly appealing one being
Dogshaker: WTB IG 2 EUR WU NOW
By mousing over the characters in his field of view, Csongor was able to identify this Dogshaker, a distinguished-looking K’Shetriae merchant in gleaming purple robes—perhaps a fashion statement intended to emphasize the fact that he dealt in the ultra-high-value Indigo coins. After a minute or so, this Dogshaker was approached by another character who apparently had Indigold to sell, and it became plain from their body language that they were whispering to each other. This meant that they had established a private chat channel and were now using it to negotiate terms. The negotiation appeared to stretch out over several minutes, which made Csongor somewhat anxious. But in due time they shook hands with each other and went their separate ways, the seller climbing up out of the pit and wandering off while the buyer remained where he was.
All of this reconnaissance had consumed a considerable amount of time, during which Marlon and James had been shouting at each other almost nonstop across the café, apparently helping each other negotiate some incredibly challenging set of obstacles, ambushes, and setbacks. Their epic adventure seemed to have driven away business at first, as the sword-and-sorcery-themed quest seemed to have destroyed the erotic ambience being sought by the mongers. Csongor had been a bit concerned that they might be thrown out of the establishment. But Yuxia had been at work distracting the proprietor, not so much by charming as by confusing him. When that began to wear thin, she had moved on to plucking money out of James’s wallet and purchasing “LDs”—Lady Drinks—shockingly overpriced beverages that were apparently the fiscal mainspring of the local hospitality industry. Thus Marlon and James had been left free to prosecute their virtual adventure. But of late there had been a lull, and when Csongor finally pulled his head out of the game for a moment to ask why, James informed him that they had fought their way to a ley line intersection and were even now in transit to Carthinias.
Now or never. Csongor created a new chat window, an invitation to set up a private conversation between Lottery Discountz and Dogshaker.
“How many Indigo do you have?” he called out.
“Twenty,” Marlon answered.
Lottery Discountz: WTS IG 20 BUX WUWT NOW
After a few moments’ pause, he saw a response:
Dogshaker: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE.
Csongor, a bit nonplussed, typed back,
Lottery Discountz: The pleasure is mutual.
Dogshaker: You don’t have it on you.
Lottery Discountz: My friend is bringing it.
Dogshaker: But your message said NOW.
Lottery Discountz: They are coming on LLI at this moment.
Dogshaker: They have muscle? Tempting robbery targets.
Lottery Discountz: Some. Maybe not enough.
Dogshaker: Which LLI are they coming to?
(For one of the reasons the Carthinias Exchange stood where it did was that it was within a couple of thousand meters of not just one but four major ley line intersections.)
Csongor repeated the question aloud.
“Who wants to know?” asked James.
“A possible buyer.”
“He wants to rob us,” Marlon said.
“He seems respectable. He’s doing big transactions in the Exchange. He’s worried you’re going to get ripped off.”
“So am I,” said James.
“Me too,” said Marlon
In the chat window, Csongor’s interlocutor was becoming impatient.
Dogshaker: Would they be coming from the Torgai Foothills by any chance?
Csongor announced, “He has guessed you’re coming from the Torgai.”
“Of course,” James said. “These guys must all know that something big is going down there.”
“Comet Rider spell is attention getter,” Marlon added, perhaps for comic effect.
Dogshaker the moneychanger, apparently fed up with Lottery Discountz’s coyness, began to climb up out of the amphitheater, headed (Csongor guessed) in the direction of the ley line intersection that would tend to be used by visitors from the Torgai Foothills. “He’s headed for your LLI,” Csongor said. “I’m following him.” And he got his hands on the keyboard and sent Lottery Discountz running in pursuit.
“Does he have muscle with him?”
“No.”
“What class of character is he?”
“Merchant.”
“Then we’re probably okay,” said James, “unless he’s only pretending to be a merchant.” During this exchange, he had been sitting back from his keyboard, taking the advantage of a lull to stretch his arms luxuriously. Csongor guessed that nothing much happened during a ley line ride. But suddenly his eyes snapped back to the screen, and he sat forward, bringing his hands back to the keyboard. “We’re sort of committed now anyway.”
“You’re at the LLI?”
“Just popped out,” James confirmed. Csongor glanced over to see that Marlon too was once again fully engaged with his computer.
“Then I’ll lead him to you.” And Csongor typed into the chat window:
Lottery Discountz: Follow me, sir.
To which the moneychanger responded immediately with “K,” that being the chat abbreviation for the unwieldy two-letter
message “OK.”
This LLI was a busy one, an area about the size and shape of a cricket oval surrounded by market stalls mostly occupied by small-time moneychangers. Upward of a hundred characters were scattered around it, some just standing there alone, others gathered in social clusters, still others engaged in duels that were frequently accompanied by spectacular magical light shows. Lottery Discountz stumbled to a halt in the middle of it and turned around several times.
Dogshaker: Is that them?
He turned to look the way Dogshaker was looking and identified Reamde and Thorakks coming their way. He replied with a Y, but Dogshaker was already running toward them. Csongor ran after. Their chat window went through some kind of reconfiguration: apparently the moneychanger had added the newcomers to the chat list, so that they could all see one another’s messages. This drew Csongor’s attention for a few moments. Another one of those crazy light shows flourished on the screen: some high-level character, locked in a duel, must be invoking a powerful spell.
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