Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4) (5 page)

No points for Lurch's telling me who it was sitting there, sniffling his sad nose and wiping his eyes with those fluffy ears of his.

As I looked at the ludicrous invention in the light of day, I somehow didn't believe the Admins had anything to do with this steampunk monster. The machine was a tiered concoction of complex artifacts, biomagical devices, and spells woven into multilevel structures. Each of its parts was quite functional in its own right, be it the infocrystal playback unit, the illusion-forming circuit or the necrochains of zombie group controls. This was exactly what a magic machine would look like, had someone decided to get one over on the admins by building it himself. And as all our attempts to contact the world's administration had been futile for quite a while, it meant that Dimka Khaman wasn't the only genius crafter around.

Our two worlds seemed to be parting their ways like ships on a virtual sea. The last passengers jumped on board in a desperate hurry not to get left behind. The command bridge was deserted as the last of the admins had already lowered a life boat and were rowing away frantically, trying to put as many miles between us and themselves as they still could. Actually, the opposite scenario could have been also true. The entire top management could have already been here on board, busy welding up hatches and bulkheads trying to insulate their VIP cabins from our third-class deck. Not a very clever move, was it, guys? If we indeed were looking at an eternity, we had plenty of time to check the ship's every nook and cranny for our ex-puppeteers. Then they'd better pray our grudge had subsided somewhat, otherwise we'd remember every tear shed in the torture basements that had flourished with their unspoken permission.

But I digress.

Back to the subject, the very idea of copying the video stream to an infocrystal was quite original. Illusion casting was entirely the enchanters' domain. They'd long since taken over the market in 3D portraits, complexity being no object. They had tried to do the same with video streaming. Having found a suitable double functionality in the IRL-to-virtuality personal message system, they attached a small video to the message, sent it, then digitized the result. Easy money.

As if! Apparently, our internal interfaces had a very limited memory. All those archived messages, maps and screenshots were small fry compared to a 900 Gb 3D-ray movie. Interestingly, the size of a player's personal memory was directly related to his or her Intellect levels.

Because of this, the enchanters had to chop every movie into several hundred fragments, patiently streaming each through their memory before uploading the master copy to a crystal. The releaser's emotions tinged the resulting illusion, adding a certain flavor of his or her own viewing experience. Thus, two digitized versions of the same film could differ as much as a bland flatbread from a multilayered festive cake. Soon the name of the releasing wizard had become just as important to the buyers as the contents of the film itself...

I shook off the memories and checked on the two crafters busy with the shuddering staff. It didn't look as if they needed me. The crafting process looked strangely reminiscent of major surgery performed without anesthesia. The staff was struggling to get free, bending at impossible angles and lifting Dimka's skinny frame into the air as the kid pressed down on it to restrain it. Gimmick whispered something sympathetic and comforting while drilling the top of the staff with his adamant bayonet. That was hardcore. Talk about battlefield surgery.

I patted the mallorn's plush bark by way of goodbye and left the garden, hurrying to the Small Guest Hall. Our ever-tightening internal security had paranoidally suggested it as the most suitable location to hold weekly senior staff meetings. Too many people had come under our wing over the last two weeks, wishing to join the Children of Night. Liberated slaves and mercs sufficiently impressed by their raid leader's derring-do, a few conscientious Dark players wishing to defend the First Temple as well as some cool-headed opportunists, they all wanted to jump on the new powerful force's bandwagon.

As for the slaves, they were not as many as I'd hoped: about fifty warriors who used to mop up Chinese donjons for their criminal masters, slightly fewer than the numbers of the still-agoraphobic crafters shading their eyes from the sun. Plus a well-honed gatherer team of a dozen rangers: the Frontier pathfinders. All of them excellent hunters with the flaying and herbal skills leveled up: a self-contained group capable of spending days roaming the dunes, filling their capacious bags with various goodies and slaughtering whatever game came their way.

There were several reasons why we'd been joined by less than a quarter of those we'd rescued. Firstly, they couldn't resist the promises of the better-off clans whose recruiters had descended upon them like vultures, harvesting the choicest minds and hands. While we'd been still stumbling in the hot desert sands, those headhunters had decimated our trophies. Too many had succumbed to their sweet offers and generous promises. We were left with only two types of people: those too scared to trust anyone and, ironically, the smartest ones who knew the importance of judging one by his deeds and not words.

Some needed a physical break, pure and simple. They were too fed up with crafting to go back to underground workshops churning out vials. They wanted to feel free for a change; to be able to spend some time alone on a river bank or check out the city's restaurants, port to other clusters in search of lost friends or simply a better place to live. Some of them would rather have moved to Europe or the States. And now that passports, entry visas and the grim frontier guards had become things of the past, when a built-in translator negated language barriers and an instant albeit pricey teleport canceled the idea of distances, AlterWorld had entered its golden age of adventure seeking.

I didn't waste time cursing the renegades. It was their life and they were welcome to ruin it at their leisure. Also, if you believed our analyst, at least half of those we'd liberated could potentially try to rejoin us at a later date. We were their happiest experience after the dark memory of slavery. Once they had their fill of partying and everyday problems, they might try to relive the safe happy feeling they'd experienced when they'd first seen the colors of our House.

Whether we'd accept them or not was a whole different ball game. We'd have to spend some quality time looking into every applicant, checking them through all available channels. Hell Hounds were a boon. One of the dogs always sat to my right at the initial interview, her piercing glare exposing the applicant's emotions and fears better than any lie detector.

"Have you ever worked for other clans' security services?"

"Would you consider submitting to us the unedited financial logs of your avatar including the file's hash sum, from the moment of your imprisonment to the present date?"

"Are you planning to relay any information about the clan to any third parties or otherwise jeopardize the clan's security?"

"Have you ever committed acts of theft, violence, murder or betrayal toward other players? If so, which were they? When did they happen? Name of each victim? Forward us the logs of the incident."

And so on and so forth. Rather amateurish, I know. Yes, a real pro could easily escape our flimsy nets. But I hoped that any infiltration attempts would come from either some armchair-spy clans or, alternatively, would be the private initiative of some virtual scammers and other such information rats. Had the Office been looking into us, we could forget any attempts at counterintelligence. True, this was a different world allowing you sometimes to get one over the seasoned Office wolves unaccustomed to the rules of this new game, like logs, mental scans, or keeping a discreet eye on the Castle. But you needed to go some to confront the real-world's secret services with their enormous experience and unlimited means.

Currently we only accepted permas, and then only after a series of thorough and admittedly boring checks. And still the new applicants kept trickling in. It had taken me some time to build my reputation but now it was working for me. We even had to erect a road block in front of Tianlong's fortress to meet those players who'd braved the desert on their own.

Rumors of the notorious Dead Lands kept luring here both adventurers and the desperate. And not only them, unfortunately. Dark suspicions of our harboring potential moles had become a certainty. A week ago, a hell hound digging in the garden had unearthed a Portal Beacon Charm buried under the thin layer of soil. A valuable acquisition indeed, but the one that was screaming about the rats we'd so gullibly sheltered in our walls. Our inaccessibility was our main protection, and now it was being majorly compromised.

I'd no idea what the owner of the buried charm had hoped for. As the castle owner and a reluctant paranoiac, I'd long blocked all portals in and around it. To jump here, you needed to obtain the Portal Hall coordinates and the access code which I changed daily. Also, I'd come up with a two-level teleport system. The first jump would take the new arrivals — be they the scheming enemy or our own group back from a mission — into an empty concrete sphere built by Lurch at the farthest possible point. Thirty feet in diameter, buried a hundred and fifty feet underground. Just like that. No entry or exit points, just some comfortable benches, two guardrooms for the interior and outside guards and a 500K GP bomb cemented into its foundations.

After a short check, the duty officer would open a portal to one of the castle's teleport points. That will teach the opposition to wander around losing portal beacons!

Cryl was a sorry sight. My newly-minted Head of Security looked gaunt and wasted. The job was way beyond his competence and his comfort zone. I knew this, of course, I just didn't have anyone to replace him with. Dan didn't mind helping us, offering his shoulder whenever we needed it, so we'd gained quite a bit of experience through his assistance. But still I was reluctant to disclose all our secrets to an outsider.

As usual, I was obliged to throw money at the problem. Luckily, the clan's treasury glittered with gold and artifact weapons. We compensated for our absence of real-life connections by hiring private eyes and surveillance experts. We used them to triple-check every applicant's story, sometimes running their report results through a random rival agency. Someone has to keep an eye on watchdogs, too.

The first person I had thus checked was Cryl himself. The agency's research had confirmed his story, even if reality turned out bleaker than his version of it. Each of his parents had had a secret affair and the kid seemed to be constantly in the way, freaking out at his own feeling of being unwanted. Most likely, his going perma hadn't been an accident. He'd simply run AWOL.

The Fallen One had kindly agreed to take the mole situation under his control. Vitally concerned by the Altar's immunity, he agreed to take the entire Guards of the First Temple alliance under his personal protection, with a negative buff as a bonus and — the pinnacle of the show — his demand that they swear a complex many-level Vow of Allegiance.

The Children of Night had been made to swear the most severe version of this oath, with some truly scary punishments for those who trespassed against the Fallen One. Which was understandable, I suppose. Breaking the vow given personally to a god was indeed a misdeed of catastrophic proportions. No amount of lifetime debuffs could ever pay for it.

I already had one, written out to me by no less than the Sun God's Patriarch, may his sky be forever clouded!

Glaring at the clan's ranks still swaying with fatigue, the Fallen One guaranteed his support to the soldiers of faith, promising one hell of a reincarnation to any potential turncoats. Giving us two days to make up our minds, he then ported off, allowing us a glimpse into the astral heights.

The same day, twelve clan members quit. No idea if there were moles among them. By then we'd already checked and eliminated everyone we'd had doubts about. We had neither the time nor skill to play a double game, feeding disinformation to a potential enemy. Our Head of Security was about to celebrate his seventeenth birthday, after all.

Later in private, the Fallen One poured some cold water over my hopes. "You shouldn't rely on the oath too much. It's only a basic logical ploy able to touch a few points in their minds. A good sleaze artist would have no problem circumventing it. Yes, I know about the so-called quasi-sentient oaths that control the person's every thought and move, interpreting any doubts against him and diligently activating the punishment block. But, you know... it's not a good idea to use them for large groups of people. Your allies might start dropping like flies which isn't going to do your reputation any favors."

Chapter Three

T
he Children of Night clan

The middle-ranking officers' personal quarters

"Bomba... Bomba, babe..."

The said lady cast a sideways glance at the reluctant Snowie and carried on with her task, preparing a somewhat complex pasta sauce. A bucketful of already-cooked spaghetti waited nearby.

The albino troll peeked into the bucket and suppressed a sigh. The spaghetti may have looked like juicy mealworms, but that's where the similarity ended. Spaghetti was disgusting and tasteless and had nothing inside.

Still, Snowie didn't dare protest. He already knew that Bomba didn't like worms for some reason.

Remembering Widowmaker's advice to compliment a lady whenever possible, Snowie racked his brains for something nice to say. "You my baby bomb... all 500 kilotons of you..."

This time the lady warrior did hear him. Swinging round, she stood with her hands on her hips, indignant. "You wanna say I'm fat?"

Snowie took another look, mentally weighing up a 500K GP — he'd lugged plenty of them down into the underground dump. Actually, the similarity was striking. But he knew better than to argue with a lady,

"My fault, sorry. Of course you're fatter than that! You're unique, almost like a 1000K blockbuster!"

Bomba raised her eyebrows in indignation, searching his face for a trace of mockery. Then she remembered who she was dealing with. Stepping closer, she patted the back of his neck. "You're my little rocky fool..."

The troll purred with delight but couldn't be sidetracked. "Bomba babe," he stubbornly continued. "I've been meaning to tell you... I've seen you looking after all those kids..."

Bomba's face darkened. Her shoulders sank. "And?"

"So how about we get our own little Snowies and Bombas? Like, gray and white, you know?"

"Like Dalmatians, you mean? No, wait! What did you just say?"

"I said, how about we get a few little munchkins of our own? Only I meant to ask you, you don't happen to know how to make baby trolls, do you?"

* * *

I was on my way to the castle's front gates when the earth trembled beneath my feet. A rockfall echoed from the walls of the few restored buildings that had risen from amid the ancient ruins still surrounding the donjon. I glanced in the direction of the third defense ring, now enveloped in a cloud of dust. Predictably, the overzealous dwarves had demolished a large chunk of the wall claiming it was beyond repair. They didn't at all enjoy handling large slabs of reinforced concrete girded with steel, so they used every opportunity to demolish the whole thing and build it anew using their own old tried and tested methods.

I startled every time they did it but the result was worth it. Granite was every bit as good as concrete, especially with all the durability runes and resistance to elements that the dwarves generously bestowed on their handiwork. This alone made me feel better, despite the funny feeling that the dwarves' motives weren't exactly altruistic. They didn't get rid of the old concrete slabs but went to great pains to crush them to dust, then strip them of every bit of steel. Mithril fragments and the silver-and-purple bullets that were stuck deep in the concrete came as a salvage bonus to quench their undying beer thirst. Whole barrelfuls — no, whole cellarfuls of beer, by the looks of it. Each!

Recently this had led to an RV between the Dwarven masters and Durin the castle keeper. The prudent zombie dwarf had taken Snowie along complete with his wondrous mithril club, but as it turned out, this wasn't his main trump card during the talks. The burly dwarves were paralyzed with envy when they saw Durin's glittering special-occasion beard. This was a masterpiece conceived by the greatest experts in jewelry and wig making, six metals plaited into six braids: copper, steel, silver, gold, platinum and mithril.

Yes, this was the gift I'd promised to my scorch-faced quartermaster. Had it not been for the beard, I'd still be begging him to agree to the RV. Now though... awe and splendor! Durin with his booming voice commanded respect and secretly dreamed about adding a seventh braid, of adamant this time. Most importantly, he was now relatively easier to deal with — as far as quartermasters went — and devoutly loyal to me as someone who'd reinvigorated both his status and his self-respect.

The talks proved to be an enormous success. Now the dwarves would have to surrender twenty-five percent of all recovered materials to the clan's treasury. Those of you unfamiliar with dwarves' nature shouldn't say anything. I'll repeat for those who are: yes, ladies and gents, you've heard it right. Twenty five!

I hired a group of a dozen goblin rangers headed by Harlequin himself to ensure the dwarves kept their end of the deal. Their custom configuration had cost me a pretty penny. Still, I suppose I had to be grateful that the hire interface allowed me to fine-tune their identities at all. I watched the pay bar go through the roof as I inched up the sliders for bravery, intuition, honesty and integrity. All I could do was shake my head at the resulting identity of a level-headed, pure-hearted, clean-handed watchdog. I should probably move them to Cryl's department: he'd appreciate a few ready-made security agents.

I absolutely needed to do whatever it took to ensure their prompt digitization. Firstly, because I needed them really badly, and secondly, because who do you think I was, shelling out four thousand bucks a month for a dozen green-skinned devils? Take Snowie, my clever albino troll: his unique custom configuration had already paid for itself, having allowed him to go perma with remarkable ease. Now all he cost me was a quite reasonable pocket allowance. Then again, introducing him to Bomba had probably not been such a clever move. Their upcoming matrimony and his position as a family breadwinner might prove quite costly as I'll be forced to pay him a top warrior's wage.

Actually, should I try and help the goblins go perma right now? What if I gave them some unique identity traits? Let's say this one had a limp from a childhood injury when he'd been caught in a wolf trap. There goes!

A moderate injury: -15% off the hire cost.

Oh wow. Piggy — off! I forced my inner greedy pig away from the controls. Trust him to come up with a bunch of blind quadriplegics for a penny a dozen.

Now. You, you'd been born on planet parade day, stripping you of all racial abilities. -30%, good. Agility a bit off but I could adjust it by hand, I suppose. As for bonuses to throwing weapons and to gathering, we didn't really need those, did we?

Now you. Sorry, buddy, but your Mom must have done it with a dwarf. Just don't ask me how she'd managed.

Half Blood!

Penalty to XP: 25%

50% growth rate to a random characteristic

Random racial skills configuration giving you a minor chance of generating a unique ability.

Well, well, well. That looked interesting. The penalty wasn't a problem. Backed by the clan's resources, I could powerlevel the Hoover Dam if need be. But 20% off his rental plus the char's apparent uniqueness were worth it. It would actually be a good idea to mix-and-breed the entire gang, that way no one'd feel under-serviced. In this manner I could save a bit of cash while making my team stand out from the regular goblin crowd.

The further racial experiments revealed a whole mine of scary developments. After I'd added four assorted races to a char's family tree, the hire interface blinked with a red message,

Warning! An uncontrollable mutation! Chances of a character's successful generation: 30%.

Warning! The summoned creature's mental makeup will qualify it as a monster rather than an NPC. Its instinct disbalance will have a tendency toward hatred, fury and anger. Priority will be given to primary strength characteristics and combat skills.

Warning! In order to control the creature, you will have to complete the following quest chain: The Child of Chaos. In order to initialize the quest, you will need to desecrate a functional temple by sacrificing its priest on the temple's altar.

Warning! Worshipping Chaos may affect the skills and appearance of your avatar!

Jesus. The character generator was smoking and snorting, offering then promptly deleting more and more pictures of potential monsters, trying to prevent the advent of a new spawn of evil. I watched a chain of slimy stooping figures flicker before my eyes. They looked so similar to the orcs of Mordor!

The mutants cost peanuts, both in gold and in mercenary points, even considering their level 200 and the ticked box of the "free movement beyond the castle walls" option. My Super Nova status allowed me to churn up a couple of thousand of those, then follow a few easy steps: take over a neighbor's castle, boost my own army numbers, rinse and repeat. Bring the nearest frontier town into submission then move on, devouring the neighboring mini cluster, my gray hordes stretching beyond the horizon... How utterly sick.

Whoever had made provision for a stunt like that? Had it been the Admins' preparation for some future global event? Or could a real seed of Chaos have sprouted in our world's backyard? I needed to have a talk with the Fallen One and monitor all the known temples, those of Light included. If any shit hit the fan, at least I would know what was going on.

I'd folded my experiments and okayed the summoning of my half-blood gang.

From that day, the goblins had been scurrying around the building site, driving everyone white-knuckle mad, but they had already earned their keep tenfold, to the point where the dwarves would try to drop an apparently dislodged rock right on top of them. In return, the goblins had gotten mithril detection down to a fine art, stripping the dwarves of any surreptitious gains.

A couple of those budding security agents had already shown some promise. One of them, the lame guy I nicknamed Tamerlane, had uncovered a scam by one of the foremen to smuggle out mithril in double-bottomed barrels. For that he'd received a commendation from me, a Corporal's insignia and a whack on the head with a hammer from the angry culprits. Much to their regret, instead of being swallowed up by the universal void, the freshly-minted corporal had happily respawned in the barracks, then grassed his assailants up in cold blood. The Dwarves' foremen mumbled their apologies, paid the fine without a sound and moved on, coming up with ever more complex building traps for their offenders. Their confrontation rocked the celestial boat, swelling with the emotions of both parties and naturally leading to the result I expected: the entire special-service gang was to go perma any day now. How'd you like that?

As a side effect of the memorable RV, the dwarves had developed a new fad — that of wearing fake modified beards. Silk colorful ribbons were immediately out: now dwarves would decorate their pride and joy with assorted bits of wire, precious stones and the hair of magical animals. They quickly came up with a strict hierarchy based on a rigid system of rules. I witnessed two silver-bearded old-timers giving a good hiding to a rank-and-file apprentice who'd dared to braid a gold thread into his own beard.

Durin wasn't upset about their copycat practices. He would just screw his face up as he decorated his own beard with his new insignia: the silver stars of a warrant officer and the
'Clean Hands'
: a modest iron medal I'd invented to award exclusively to support troops. The dwarves were in for a new shock.

After I'd demonstrated the Heart of the Temple fragment to Patriarch Thror and the deputies of the Dwarven priests' underground, I'd demanded the promised seven million gold and five hundred craftsmen for the restoration of the castle's defensive capacity.

The dwarves played hard to get, asking me to hand the artifact over to them, and then maybe... I didn't listen any further. What if they lost the artifact in some of their internal priestly games or just summoned the wrong deity — say, Hephaestus who too was a patron god of blacksmiths. And that wasn't the worst option even. The problem was, the Fragment was neutral to both Dark and Light, capable of restoring a temple of any existing pantheon. And I really couldn't allow the Light ones to have a power tool like that.

Another thing was, whoever summoned the god automatically received all of his gifts, depending on the level of the temple. I'd already cashed in whatever the Fallen One and Macaria had had to offer, but it was Ruata who'd laid her greedy mitts on Lloth's gifts. That Dome Shield around her altar was too good for words. Even the Fallen One complete with girlfriend had spent a good quarter of an hour trying to breach it.

No, I don't mean that I hoped to get something equally as awesome. After all, her Impregnable Dome Shield was erected in a divine place of power, the closest thing to Lloth's own halls. There, the goddess had been in peak form which had in turn allowed her to inflict the ultimate discomfort upon my two rescuers. But still.

I didn't want to part with whatever gifts Aulë had to offer. Even though level-1 altar only allowed for some petty craft items for blacksmiths, jewelers and artifact makers, already at level 4 Aulë offered his followers an unexpectedly hefty gift, the Heavenly Hammer. Imagine a tank dropped from the top of the Empire State.
Bang!
Even if it missed your head, the man-made earthquake would break your legs, crush your bones and knock out all your teeth from a carelessly dropped jaw. A century-old Naval expression had described it as "kinetic concussion". That's when the armored deck buckles under your feet through shell impact, kicking you so hard that it snaps your bones.