Rise of the Fire Tamer (The Wordwick Games #1) (3 page)

Chapter 2

E
ventually the dinner ended, and even Gem found herself full. Most of Henry Word’s advisors drifted off when he announced that he was going to take the five winners on a tour of the castle. The only one who stayed was a balding man in slightly frayed tweed, whom Mr. Word introduced as Dr Percy Brown, his personal physician.

“Percy has been vital in keeping me running well enough to produce Wordwick, as well as making more than a few contributions himself. Hopefully he’ll also make sure that I don’t get you all hopelessly lost while I show you round.”

“Lost? Hah!” Dr Brown stuck his hands in his pockets in a way that reminded Gem of one of her teachers. “You designed half of this place yourself. It’s the rest of us that have to worry about getting lost.”

“Well then, another tour should help, shouldn’t it?”

Gem and the others followed in the two men’s wake as they started back towards the lobby. Gem found Sparks beside her as they walked.

“So what do you think of Henry Word?” he asked softly. Gem shrugged.

“He seems very confident,” she whispered back. “But I guess he would be. His father was rich, and he’s built up an empire of his own.”

“You know a lot about him.”

Gem wondered if she should mention that her father worked as his lawyer. Sparks seemed nice enough, but from the way he’d first greeted her, she suspected that he would think that had had something to do with her getting to be here. Kat had almost said as much.

‘I just did some research.”

If Sparks was going to say anything back, he was cut off as Henry Word drew to a halt.

“Right then, this is the lobby. From here, you can get to a few places that might interest you. If you would, Percy.’ He nodded to a door, and Dr Brown opened it. Behind it stood a large, carpeted room filled from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Instead of ladders to access the higher shelves, there were mechanical arms, similar to the ones found at fairgrounds to grab prizes, and connected to small screens with joysticks. Gem guessed that was probably easier for Mr. Word than having to call someone over every time he wanted a book. Probably more fun, too. A ring of great oak desks dominated the middle of the room, forming a circle around a marble bust of a man’s head. Briefly, Gem thought it might be of Henry Word when he was younger, but there were enough subtle differences that she decided it had to be a relative.

“My father, William Ralph Word,’ Henry Word announced. ‘I thought I should have a statue of the old boy somewhere. There’s a complete run of everything his newspaper empire put out too, though if you want something that won’t put you to sleep, there’s a lot of other stuff too.”

He wheeled around and headed for one of the other doors. Gem got the feeling that Henry Word liked having everyone hurry to keep up. He threw open the next door, and they all scrambled through. It was a recreation room, Gem noticed, with a row of old-fashioned arcade machines along one wall, a pool table in the middle, and a few chairs off to one side surrounding a sleek looking music station. The chairs looked like the sort that more or less swallowed you up when you tried to sit down, so that you needed at least two attempts to get up.

“We usually keep the pool table set up for nine-ball,” Henry Word said. “Don’t play against Percy though. He’s something of a pool shark.”

“I am not!” Dr Brown complained. “I just happen to apply the basic principles of physics-“

“And he’s easy to tease.” Henry Word grinned as he said it. “Come on, let’s take you to Percy’s home-from-home. That should calm him down.’

This door, Gem noted, had an electronic lock added to the wood. Henry Word punched in the combination and it swung open, revealing the sort of room that never should have lived behind a wooden door. A sliding, motion sensing, high-tech door perhaps, but not a wooden one.

The space was almost as big as the Great Hall, and wasn’t cluttered up with things like long tables. All the tables here were individual workstations, holding computers, people working at the computers, and the sort of small fluffy toys that inevitably collect around them. The people were mostly casually dressed, and would occasionally look up to ask one another questions, but mostly they kept their eyes glued to the screens. The floor around the walls was a mess of wires, looking like someone had spilled a plate of spaghetti and then decided to connect it to the mains. Most of them ran into a blocky server station at one end of the room at some point.

“This is where we run Wordwick,” Henry Word announced. “I’ve got some of the finest computer minds in the country, the world even, working constantly to build it, update it and keep it running.”

“It’s very impressive,” Gem said. One of them had to.

“Impressive.” Dr Brown shook his head. “Hardly. We’re not running nearly as efficiently as we should be, and then there are the overheating problems, the-“

“I think that’s our cue to leave Percy to it,” Henry Word suggested, and the six of them left as the advisor started issuing instructions to people at the nearest terminals. “I think perhaps we should try the gardens next.”

They did. Gem kept pace with the wheelchair, and Sparks kept up with her. Rio lagged behind a pace or two, as though showing enthusiasm about a garden wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to do. Kat and Jack brought up the rear, mostly because Jack’s own enthusiasm kept fixing on parts of the castle architecture, or particularly interesting heraldic shields, or any one of the hundred other things there were to catch a history buff’s eye. As far as Gem could see, Kat was more or less dragging him along.

They followed Henry Word outside, then around the side of the main keep, through a small gate in a walled off area of the castle. Gem found herself hit by the scent of roses, and looked around to see them in every shade from white to the deepest red, growing on trellises, or out of flowerbeds, or around benches.

“This is beautiful,” Gem said.

“You’d never be able to skate it properly though,” Kat said from behind her. “And roses? It’s so…girly. Just your sort of thing, probably,” she added in Gem’s direction.

“Well, everyone has their own opinion.” Henry Word’s tone was carefully diplomatic. “I kept the rose garden on from the previous owners. I find them rather peaceful.”

That peace was briefly shattered as a screeching sound cut through the rose garden. Gem jumped at it. The only consolation was that it caught everyone else almost as much by surprise.

“What was that?” Rio demanded. “Some sort of cat?”

“It’s a peacock,” Gem guessed.

“That’s right.” Henry Word looked pleased. “You get used to the noise after a while, so don’t let it bother you. If we are lucky, they will be out on the lawns where we can see them.”

He led the way through the other side of the rose gardens, to a spot overlooking a garden that was more like a park in size. It had been laid out in ordered shapes that made it look like the pieces to some giant jigsaw puzzle from their vantage point.

“Another inheritance from the people I bought the place from,” Henry Word explained. “Though they had let it go quite a bit. I learned that it had been laid out a few hundred years ago by the great garden designer Capability Brown, and I was able to find the plans. It seemed like a good idea to have it put back as it was.”

He led them along the garden paths, and as Gem had noticed when she arrived, the gardens contained a maze of hedges that reached over head height. Given how uninterested she had been in the rose garden, Kat seemed to like the maze, asking how difficult it was to get through. She obviously caught Gem’s surprised look at that, because she shrugged.

“What? I like puzzles.”

The final stop on their tour was the castle’s lake, which was really an extension of the moat. It stretched out for what had to be half a mile, and Gem could only just make out the small summerhouses and boathouses on the other side.

“This is even more space than back home,” Sparks observed.

“Yeah, well imagine what it’s like for the rest of us, farm boy,” Rio muttered softly. Gem doubted that the other boy heard. Maybe Henry Word did though, because he chose that moment to bring the tour to a close, saying that they should get back to the house. He led the way again, and the two older boys kept pace. Gem found herself walking with Kat and Jack.

“So,” she said to Jack, “what did you think of the tour?”

“It was… that is… I um…” he hurried away to catch the others.

“I think he must be nervous,” Gem said to Kat.

“Funny that. He wasn’t nervous around
me
.”

They got back to the lobby ok, and Henry Word led them to the last of the doors leading off from it, which turned out to be for an elevator. He waited until they were all inside before speaking.

“Right, that’s most of the tour. I will take you up to your rooms now, and you can settle in. You might want to get some sleep. Before that though, I know you have all been dying to find out more about Wordwick’s Anachronia level, so I won’t keep you waiting any longer.

“It’s very straightforward really. Your goal when playing it will be to win the crown of the kingdom of Anachronia, using all your wits, skills and talents. The people will only give the crown to someone who can do three things: end the threat of the three-headed dragon terrorizing the land, unite the two warring clans that live there, and help the people of Anachronia flourish. Is that clear?”

Gem nodded. Several of the others did too.

“It sounds simple,” Sparks said, beside her.

“Oh, it’s not as easy as it sounds,” Henry Word continued, “which is why there are a few other things you should know. First, beware the Wickedly Woods where the dragon lives. It isn’t the only danger there. Second, remember that you can work together, even if only one of you can rule in the end. Third, and most importantly, remember that words have power in Anachronia, finding the right words, the Ruler Words, along the way will make your time far easier.”

The elevator came to a halt then, and Henry Word led them to a hallway that was almost a mirror of the lobby, except that the five doors here were open, and led to bedrooms. Gem could see that her bags had been brought up and left just inside the door to one of them. She walked over.

It was a surprisingly large bedroom, and it was warm thanks to the rows of tapestries covering the walls. There was a bookshelf with a few volumes, set above a small desk that stood next to a chest of drawers. The bed was a curtained four-poster affair that looked like it knew the same swallowing people up trick as the chairs in the recreation room.

The only thing that didn’t fit lay on one side of the room, and it
really
didn’t fit. It was as though the same people who had been so meticulous in finding genuine medieval objects to decorate the rest of the castle had suddenly thrown up their collective hands in defeat and shoved in something from a science fiction show. It was a pod, just a little larger than a person, made of a clear plastic substance with holes in it for air. There was a screen built into the open lid, along with a big red button that looked like the sort of thing they had on machinery to stop it in emergencies.

“Those are our gaming pods,” Henry Word explained. “We think they will give you a… fuller gaming experience. Well, I’ll let you all get to sleep. Goodnight.”

As he left them, Gem knew that the others’ eyes would be firmly on the pod in their room. She knew hers were.

Jack
spent a couple of minutes looking at the pod before he climbed into it. It was even more interesting than the castle, and a lot easier to deal with than talking to beautiful girls. He lay down, checked briefly to make sure that his glasses were in place, and closed the lid…

Sparks took a little longer, mostly because he wanted to get a better look at how the thing worked. He was impressed. Whoever had designed this was a genius. With the sort of speed he normally reserved for dodging high-school linebackers, he leapt into the thing and let the top swing down…

Kat unpacked before she got round to the pod, though since her method of unpacking was simply to shove things into any drawer that looked about the right size, it didn’t take long. When she did look at it, it occurred to her that it looked a bit like a coffin, so as she lay down she folded her arms and did her best to affect a Transylvanian accent, not entirely successfully. “Off to Anachronia ve go…”