Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “Of course this isn’t happening.” Josiah was standing about twenty feet from Roland on a perfectly flat, perfectly still stretch of sand. He sounded bored. “How could any of this be happening? You must be going mad. It’s the only reasonable explanation.”

  Mel stood and held out a hand to Freddy. Unsteadily, Freddy tottered to her feet. The landscape was twirling around in dizzying circles. “I’m going to throw up,” said Mel in thoughtful tones.

  “No,” said Freddy, forcing the words out past the pain. “Stop looking at it. Come on.”

  They struggled over towards Roland. “Oh, you can’t do that,” said Josiah.

  Roland followed his gaze. “Yes, they can. Freddy, roll a d20 for initiative.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “You said GM and NPC! You’ve got me thinking in those terms! I can’t help it!” he said frantically. “You can sign! How can you?”

  They needed to have a conversation. There was way too much for them to say to each other. They couldn’t have a conversation now. She shrugged impatiently. “Okay, yeah, right, never mind. You’re the storyteller. They’re the story. Stop letting them control you!” she screamed over the rising wind. They had reached him now. The sand swirled up around them, vicious and stinging.

  “Spot check. Spot check,” said Mel, pointing. Josiah was wandering towards them. Where he stepped, the heaving desert went calm. The sky was turning to knives somewhere above.

  “You’re not a storyteller,” said, and signed, Josiah. He hadn’t raised his voice, but it came clear and loud above the wind. He had cleared the air in front of him so Roland could see him signing. “You have one function only. You know you get into trouble when you listen to Freddy.” Freddy thought it was a mistake. When Cuerva Lachance and Josiah tried to work at the same time, they cancelled each other out.

  Freddy grasped Roland by the shoulders, spun him around, and hollered right into his face, “You should have been listening to me all along. You’re giving them too much power! You created them!”

  He stared at her. “I never.”

  “Thousands and thousands of years ago,” said Freddy. “You told a story, and they were born. It was a story about how the world was created, so you gave them a lot of power, but they were still yours. They’ve always been yours! Life after life, they convince you you’re Three, and the choice makes you seem … third. Less important. They’re just stories, Roland!”

  “The stories are killing us,” Mel pointed out. “Somebody needs to do something before we drown in impossible sand.”

  “There’s nothing you can do except make the choice.” Josiah was very close now. Roland wasn’t looking at him.

  “I can’t do it. I just make role-playing games. I’m the wrong person. They’re far more powerful than I am,” said Roland, tears spilling from his eyes.

  She shook him. “You stupid idiot,” she shouted, trying to ignore the sand scraping her throat. There was no use in shouting at Roland, who would have understood to the same degree if she had whispered, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Do you know how many times I’ve met you, all through history? You’ve been leaders and poets and all kinds of things, and you’ve always been more powerful than you thought. You were Bragi Boddason. You were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for crying out loud!”

  Roland, trembling, looked to Mel for help. “You know,” she said, “the pleasure-dome guy.”

  Roland gulped. “I … I was him? I don’t…”

  “You were him,” said Freddy.

  “I remember that poem,” said Roland. “I used it.”

  “Well, use it again.”

  “Really, really quickly,” Mel added, “pretty please.”

  Josiah had reached them. “Stop this nonsense,” he said, laying a hand on Roland’s shoulder. But Roland couldn’t hear him.

  Roland said:

  “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.”

  The pleasure-dome built itself across the sky.

  It was crystal, Freddy thought: a strange, impossible multifaceted crystal sparkling into existence in the middle of the sandstorm. It cut off the wind. Cuerva Lachance yelped and slid down off the rock, her trench coat torn to tatters by the storm she had herself been stirring up. The few remaining rags of the coat fluttered down onto the sand. But the sand was going, too. Freddy felt grass springing up beneath her feet. Hedges, half wild, half cultivated, erupted out of the ground and wove themselves into mazes. Josiah was knocked aside by one, dragged away into greenery. The crystal dome turned the air to rainbows.

  Freddy saw her bag lying not far from her on the grass. She picked it up. “Stop this,” said Josiah from somewhere in the middle of a bush.

  “I like it. It’s pretty,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I’m still generally opposed, you understand.”

  “Mel, don’t forget you’re a cleric,” said Roland, watching Freddy pull the microgun out of her bag. “Freddy, I think you’d better be a fighter.”

  “This is game stuff, is it?” said Freddy. “What does a fighter do?”

  “A fighter fights,” said Mel. “I have magical powers, but I haven’t got any spells prepared. But, I mean … is this really going to work?”

  “I say it is. It’s my story. Use the spells you had prepared for our next session,” said Roland.

  “You’re thinking too logically,” said Freddy, cocking the gun.

  “No,” said Roland. “The game has rules. I think stories do, too.”

  “But—”

  Mel cut her off. “He’s right. There needs to be a mixture. If we’re too logical about this, we let Josiah in. If we cut too many corners, we let in Cuerva Lachance.”

  Freddy opened her mouth to protest, but then, oddly, she saw Roland as she had always seen him: as someone neat and messy at the same time, someone who put everything in order but threw it into chaos simultaneously. He had always been a mixture. It still didn’t entirely make sense to her, but maybe he was right. They needed to treat this as a story, and stories had structure and creativity. They couldn’t just throw random bits of plot around and hope they did something useful.

  “They’re NPCs,” said Roland. Freddy thought he was talking to himself. “Just NPCs…”

  “Not truly,” said Cuerva Lachance, floating across the ground towards them. “We’ve become very real over the millennia. You lost control of us long ago. I think it’s fantastic.”

  “We built our own rules to compensate,” said Josiah. He was still trying to fight free of his bush, so Roland couldn’t see him. Mel signed a translation. “We do better that way.”

  “Yeah,” said Freddy, “and you basically convince all the Threes that they’re your … well, that they’re your thralls. Don’t you?”

  “Why shouldn’t we?” said Josiah, his voice clipped and sharp. “Why should we be their thralls? That’s what you’re trying to make happen, isn’t it? I won’t be turned into a puppet!”

  He tumbled free of the bush, rolling out onto the grass. “I should have thought you would understand,” he spat straight at Freddy. “You lived in our house for weeks. You saw them.”

  Mel and Roland turned to look at her. “You saw who?” said Mel.

  The figments. She had seen them all through the house. Josiah hadn’t liked even to acknowledge they were there.

  “There were … sort of fictional characters walking around all the time,” said Freddy. “But they weren’t very real.”

  “We attract them,” said Josiah. “You thought it was Cuerva Lachance creating them, but it wasn’t. They turn up wherever we live because they think we’re like them. Well, ‘think’ is the wrong word. They’re mindless. People tell them as stories, so they float around like … like ghosts.”

  “There’s always been something different about Three,” said Cuerva Lachance. “
Something stronger. Josiah tells me you saw the first Three. I don’t remember that far back, but I think … we hadn’t become entirely real yet then.”

  “We made ourselves real. It wasn’t Three’s doing,” said Josiah.

  “But Three did make you,” said Freddy. “You have no right to … to break free like this.”

  Josiah applauded, his face twisted into a sarcastic scowl. “Oh, nicely done. What beautiful hypocrisy. Aren’t you the one always whining about how you hate being restricted because you feel trapped and fated when you’re travelling in time? And now you want us to go back to not being real people? Doing what he tells us to do … thinking what he tells us to think?”

  “If the alternative is you strangling me with a living rock,” said Freddy, “yeah, I do.”

  They were dangerous … weren’t they? Roland had kept telling her how dangerous they were. The thought of unreal people who had somehow broken into reality having as much power as Cuerva Lachance and Josiah was kind of terrifying. Dimly, she remembered Filbert and the other future Threes. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance had apparently not been around in the future. Was it because of what happened here and now? Could Roland tame them or even destroy them?

  Did she want him to?

  “Then you’re worse than I am,” said Josiah. “And we’re not going to let you do it.”

  “Snakes,” said Cuerva Lachance, grinning. The ground began to writhe.

  “I cast ‘Protection from Evil.’” Mel’s voice came out as a squeak. Freddy thought they were just words until she saw the blue glow starting at the tips of Mel’s fingers. It coiled out and around Mel, then Freddy and Roland as well. Mel may not have been expecting the spell to work; she gazed at her hands in amazement. Freddy’s feet left the ground. She looked down. Beneath her, what had once been grass was a slithering mass of bodies.

  Roland roared, “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea!”

  They were on a boat … a little sailboat about twenty feet long. The pleasure-dome still stretched above, but they were being knocked about by the waves, which were teeming with strange, slippery creatures. The waves were eerily silent. Back on her feet again, Freddy staggered and faced Roland. “Slimy things…?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s a poem. It may be Coleridge. A different poem, not the first one,” said Roland. His words came out breathless and panicky. “There are all kinds of things in my head.”

  “I think you need to go beyond Coleridge,” said Mel. “Use your own imagination.”

  “But I just read the manuals,” said Roland. “I don’t really make stuff up.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  “And even if it is, learn how,” Freddy shouted as Cuerva Lachance sent the boat racing up the side of a monstrous wave. Freddy leaned into the railing as the deck threatened to turn into a wall.

  Roland was sliding towards the mast. “I don’t know what to do. This has to be structured like a story or it won’t work. But they’re still controlling everything!”

  “They’re not,” said Mel, clinging to the railing and trying, with limited success, to sign one-handed. “This is your world; you made it. They’re making you think they can control it.”

  “Watch,” said Freddy. There was something she hadn’t done yet: something she knew she was going to do because she’d seen the evidence of it four years ago. She might as well use it as a demonstration.

  Lurching against the trembling boards, she ran at Cuerva Lachance. No one had been expecting her to do that. Cuerva Lachance threw up her hands as Freddy brought the handcuffs, still dangling from one wrist, around in an arc. The free cuff caught Cuerva Lachance on the cheek, digging a groove in her flesh. She had already been off balance; now she cried out and fell down. “They can be hurt,” Freddy screamed back at Roland just as the boat topped the wave and began to dive down its other side, sending everyone not clinging to something sliding back down the deck’s suddenly reversed slope. “They’ve made themselves too real. If this is a story, hurry up and write the climax!”

  “Climax,” said Roland, gasping a little. He had anchored himself to the mast. “I can do that. I can—”

  “Oh no,” said Mel. “All Roland’s climaxes have—”

  Something erupted from the ocean so violently that it sent a concussion through the air. The ship twirled and plummeted away from the abruptly flattened wave, smashing into the surface of the sea. Freddy was knocked down beside Cuerva Lachance. Side by side, the two of them looked up … and up. After that, they looked up some more.

  24

  “Tentacles?” said Cuerva Lachance. “Really?”

  “Big tentacles,” said Freddy. “Extremely big and twisty tentacles.”

  “They make good final monsters,” said Roland a little too calmly.

  Josiah said, “This is why we don’t leave the Threes in charge. This is why we need to control them with the choice. Do you understand yet, ducklings? Isn’t it fun what an unfettered imagination can do when it’s capable of making stories come to life?”

  The tentacles kept rising, as silent as the sea. Freddy wasn’t sure how many there were, but she also wasn’t sure it mattered. They blocked out the pleasure-dome. They were going to fall on the boat and sink it. The boat wasn’t moving much at the moment, but she thought that may have been mostly because Roland was so focussed on the tentacles that he had forgotten about everything else.

  She stood. A second or so later, Cuerva Lachance did as well.

  “Roland,” said Mel, “did you have to?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do. It just happened. There are always tentacles.” He looked thoroughly awed by what he had created.

  Freddy said, “Well, make them go away.”

  “He can’t,” said Josiah. “He’s just the storyteller. He’s written them in. Immediately writing them out again would be cheating.” He looked sourly at Roland. “But he can tell us to stop them.”

  Everyone turned to Josiah.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he said acidly when they wouldn’t stop staring. “I thought you’d figured it out. It would be a masterful plan if it wasn’t so obviously a complete accident. Oh, gosh, look … giant tentacles! We must all work together to defeat the scary monster! And gee willikers, wouldn’t it just be easier if we let him tell us how the story was supposed to go? Like, I don’t know, we were characters?”

  He scowled blackly at the tentacles writhing overhead. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in his world now … first the pleasure-dome, then the slimy sea. This is what the choice is for: convincing Three he doesn’t have access to this kind of control. When he brought Leggy there into existence, he pulled us right inside his story. It’s like being caught in a tightening noose, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t see—” started Mel.

  “The story tells us what we have to do,” Josiah said. He turned furiously to Freddy. “It’s like time travel! That moaning you did about fate. Well, being trapped in someone else’s story is worse. You don’t think for yourself. You don’t think at all. You do what the story tells you … what the author makes you. That’s what the tentacles are for.”

  The tentacles were beginning to curl down towards them. They were so dense that it almost seemed as if night had fallen.

  “He’s right,” said Cuerva Lachance, “unfortunately. Three’s already started writing us again.”

  Freddy thought she saw. The story Roland had created was herding them all in one direction: they had to fight the tentacles. They had to do it his way. Mel and Freddy did, too, but they weren’t fictional; it didn’t mean the same thing to them. The story was in control now. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah were being shoved back into it.

  She should have felt glad about that. She wasn’t sure she did. She remembered what the time travel had been like.

  “So we’ve won,” said Mel.

  “I don’t care,” said Josiah.

  Mel opened her mouth but didn’t speak. Freddy fel
t her throat constrict. Abruptly, she knew what was coming.

  Josiah shrugged, his eyes hard and cold. “I don’t care how the story goes. I won’t go back to being … that. Fight the damn squid monster yourself. I’m done.”

  “It’s going to squash us all,” said Freddy.

  “I’ve lived for thousands of years,” said Josiah. “I’ve never been squashed before. Bring it on.”

  “I’ve got to agree,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Better horrible mangled death than mindless puppetdom. Or was that the other way around?”

  “Roland,” said Freddy.

  He was white and clenched. “I can’t stop the story. It’s a story. It … I tried just to wish us out of here, and I couldn’t. We have to follow the rules if we want to get to the end.”

  “Not all stories have happy endings,” said Mel. “Josiah—”

  “No,” he said. “If I’m going to be killed, I’m going to be real and killed. And the story will end my way.”

  He meant it. Freddy had never seen him mean something so completely.

  The tentacles were twisting down towards them, probably quite quickly, but the world had again gone slow. Freddy thought of how she had always known Josiah had been hiding something from her. She thought of how frightened he had seemed in the future when he couldn’t find his other self. She thought of Roland feeling hemmed in and trapped … of herself feeling hemmed in and trapped. Of, now, Josiah and Cuerva Lachance feeling the same way. She thought of Ban. Ban had said everything was backwards, but she hadn’t been a puppet; she had been just as much a real person as Cuerva Lachance was now.

  “I don’t know what to do, Freddy!” Roland nearly wailed.

  It had to be possible for Three to keep the power and Cuerva Lachance and Josiah to stay real. In the best stories, the characters aren’t predictable. They do unexpected things. They defy the author. They seem alive …

  Freddy thought about stories. She thought about the kind of stories Roland told.

  “PCs,” said Freddy, and signed it.