Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4) Read online

  Noticing his faithful servant's sorry state, the Sun God snapped his fingers again, generating the Revitalizing Wave. Instinctively the Patriarch pulled at the collar of his robe, gasping for air, as everything around him sprang to life. The wilting flowers in a vase perked up; back in the temple's kitchen the already-plucked chickens quivered back to life. The God never bothered to pace his power, preferring to awe into submission everyone who beheld his divine might. His type isn't uncommon among humans, either, like those who proffer a bone-crushing handshake to their potential opponent.

  "I thank thee, O Great One," the Patriarch lowered his head, hiding his reddened eyes blotted with burst blood vessels. He hadn't profited much from the healing overdose. In the past, people had been known to explode in a fountain of blood from a surfeit of mana.

  The Sun God gave him a benign nod. "Enjoy a new lease of life, you maggot. What do we have on our army that combats so much evil? How many followers of Light do you think you can raise to mop up the Dead Lands?"

  The question seemed to surprise the Patriarch. "As many as you wish! To my estimation, we have well over forty million Immortals in our ranks. Thirty million of them are active, meaning they've prayed at least once in the past month. Plus all the locals and the numerous creatures of Light indigenous to this world. Your one word would be enough — with enough Faith points offered to the Immortals and just a drop of Divine Power for everybody else."

  The Sun God winced. He hated sharing his mana resources with anyone. The moment his inner reserves dropped a notch, he felt vulnerable: this could be the difference between life and death in the case of a surprise attack. You could say what you want, but twenty-seven reincarnations could make anyone paranoid.

  Faith points weren't so easy to come by, either. They were well and truly limited, by far not enough to go round a million-strong army. True, he'd managed to save quite a few by allowing his priests to spend their own resources. This stash should be enough to get two hundred priests to the Tenth Circle — the highest one.

  And this was a trump card indeed, especially while it was still secreted up his sleeve and not lying on the table for everyone to see. Oh no, he wasn't going to waste this wealth by spreading it thinly over a hundred thousand Immortals. They'd have to do without. Immortal animals! The world had gone mad! In his previous incarnations, his one sidelong glance had been enough to send entire cities onto funeral pyres to willingly burn themselves alive with a song and a blissful smile on their lips. Here though, you had to pay for everything — even worse, they'd study your gift all over, using some weird, what's-the-name, stats calcu... calcal... cal-cu-lators, only to toss it aside and move on, browsing through the market's best offers.

  Never mind. One day death would sort 'em all out.

  The Patriarch had patiently waited for the pensive shadow to leave his God's brow before going on,

  "The numbers of the Dark followers are a fraction of ours. However, the local creatures they've recruited are indeed legion. Little wonder: this is a new world crawling with all sorts of evil spirits. Whether the Fallen One is strong enough to summon them to help him is a different matter entirely."

  The Sun God waved the suggestion away. "A newborn god! How old is he — two, three years old? I've spent more time just wiping my ass in any of my reincarnations! I'd spent twelve thousand blissful years in the Mayall's system alone until the planet's sun finally exploded. And when several billion sentients die believing it was their Sun God punishing them for their sins... You know, I very nearly made the Creator level then. I was missing one petty bit of data, a tiny little key opening the Heavenly Gates."

  He fell silent, deep in thought, while the Patriarch stooped in veneration, mopping the God's groomed hands with a soft towel. Finally, the god awoke from his musings,

  "To recruit the army, you should use all the right words in combination with some flexible thinking and bags of gold. Gold is something everyone wants — it's replenishable and we have lots of it. The Pantheon will only step in in case of an emergency. Everything has to be done by the hand of the mob... er, of our flock. The Universal balance is not exactly reliable. It loves taking the side of the underdog. In this situation you never know how it might backfire. You kill a lone Dark hero, and the next thing a great general will arrive at your walls with an army to match! No, we can't take that risk."

  The God concentrated, listening to the Altar. It was packed, the surplus of mana now being channeled over to his priests for some quality miracle-working and demon-fighting. With a bitter smile, the Sun God scooped up a handful of free energy and looked around for a suitable target. A copper statue of a warrior guarded the entrance to his personal quarters. Good enough. Concentrating, he forced the raw mana into the copper's atomic structure, shuffling its electrons, protons and neutrons around. The statue blurred, heating up and melting, exuding gamma radiation.

  He struggled, straining, for a minute or so. The air in the hall had grown considerably hotter. With a sharp gasp, the God reached into the Altar again, scooping out the last of its stocks. Not enough. Disappointed with his miscalculations, he reached into his personal reserves. Once initiated, the transmutation process couldn't be aborted. The energy released was comparable with that of solar plasma — enough for one hell of an explosion.

  His face a mask of fake nonchalance, he turned to the priest,

  "There, take it. There's about a ton of gold here. Use it to mint some coinage to advance the mercs for the upcoming raid."

  If the truth were known, this wasn't the best gold in the world. It had turned out to be too unstable, with a half-life time of only a hundred and eighty-six days. Not his problem, anyway. It made it all the more easier to locate hidden treasures — provided you knew what to look for and how to go about it...

  * * *

  The quiet buzz of an incoming call forced my stare away from the staff that was being forced into submission. I focused on the interface aglow with all the menus and chat boxes like I was some goddamn cyborg.

  Only those closest to me had the audio session codes. I'd done so in order to protect myself from all the spam and cheating when enemies flooded your channels with all sorts of useless junk.

  "Max, the morning staff meeting is in six minutes. You're late. Your Russian salad's already waiting!"

  My quiet groan was drowned out by the happy trills of Elven laughter. "It's your own fault! You've got the servant girls hooked on all that gold, so now you'd better eat it and say thank you. Actually, one of them has just submitted a request to buy herself out of her contract. Whoever gave her the idea! Formally, the contract makes no provision for a bailout so we're not really obliged to do anything about it. Still, the staff are all restless and excited waiting for our decision. The suggested sum for contractual termination — seventy-three gold and a handful of mithril — is actually almost twice as much as her de facto wage. Are you into dealing a bit of ebony these days, chief?"

  What a cheek! Had she just called me a slave trader? "Amara, I've been meaning to ask Dennis to limit your access to that wretched zombie box. You seem to be a walking collection of TV memes. What my Master Analyst needs is peace and quiet, not some blinking 3D image surrounded by four blabbing zombie heads as speakers."

  "But..."

  "Sorry, Snow White. Over and out."

  Heh. Her name Amara in fact meant Snow in Ilitiiri. And still calling a Drow white was bordering on offensive.

  Never mind. Let her fume and plot her revenge at her leisure. Nothing I hadn't survived before. All I was doing was following up on a request made by the newest addition to my clan: my Master Analyst that I'd so cunningly stolen from the mercs.

  The thing was, Amara was an NPC. A perma, definitely, who couldn't care less about algorithms, every bit as autonomous as the evil Princess Ruata — but an NPC nonetheless.

  For the last few weeks we'd been busy trying to expand her emotional background by exposing her to our cultural environment through hundreds of books and terabytes
of classic movies. We were attempting to humanify Dennis' girlfriend.

  Actually, Dennis' going perma was a story and a half. If I could put it in gaming terms, the Gods had played a cruel joke on the kid by investing all of his starting characteristics into Intellect alone. He was a doubled-up quadriplegic, his neck craned at a scary angle, who could just about control three fingers of his left hand. At the feast of life he was an unwelcome guest.

  Well, we're not in Sparta any more, meaning no one throws our sickly newborns off cliffs. Which was why Dennis' parents had chosen to legally disown him in the maternity ward. In a way, he'd been lucky, ending up in a high-flying children's home controlled by some governmental top brass: a convenient show place to demonstrate to various committees investigating the use of public funds, donations and foreign grants.

  A cute blond baby in a custom-made wheelchair gazed at the visiting officials with his huge blue eyes, his piercing stare making the seasoned corruption wolves stumble and look away.

  With a mental shrug, the boy would return to his usual occupation. Click, click, click. The children's home teachers smiled behind his back, watching him leaf through the electronic pages of high-brow books: let the kid have his fun.

  He hadn't been having fun. He'd been reading. Twenty seconds a page, an hour and a half per book. His unique photographic memory allowed him to quote any part of any book at random.

  At the age of sixteen, he'd discovered the world of online poker games. And once he'd become a runner-up at a few serious tournaments, his financial problems had become a thing of the past.

  At seventeen, he'd become addicted to math. He'd made considerable progress in solving the problem of the millennium, Riemann's hypothesis. He'd even sent his notes as far as Moscow University, to the dean of the physics faculty. He never received any answer — unlike the professor himself who'd enjoyed a lot of praise for an article he'd later written for a specialist publication. Had Dennis had the chance to read it, he'd have immediately recognized the chiseled filigree of his own calculations. The unscrupulous number-cruncher was packing his bags, heading for Cambridge, Massachusetts to pick up his Millennium Prize, while the young man had already found a new interest: cosmology.

  We might have finally grown our own Stephen Hawking albeit of a more institutionalized background — especially because Dennis had doubtlessly one advantage over the greatest scholar of our time who was forced to control his computer and speech synthesizer by tensing his cheek muscle. Unlike him, Dennis had all of three fingers moving.

  And still teenage hormones often got the better of him, forcing Dennis to abandon the secrets of the Universe and spend hours browsing through nude pictures of the VirtNet. Until one day she smiled at him from inside the 3D image. A perfect face, the ultimate in female allure, the mathematical triumph of AI Beauty.

  Dennis wasn't even scandalized by the site's triple-X rating and the caption under the screenshot saying, Virtual sex tourism. 2000 gold an hour. Drow Amara. AlterWorld, the Original City, Red Light District. At Madame Clo's. If anything, it made him happy. It meant that the girl, however digital, did exist.

  Youngsters flooded the comments to the picture, drooling over her Dark Elven body with its promise of domination as they discussed the impossibility of it: a Drow selling herself! They'd even started a fundraising campaign and a lottery to choose a lucky one from among them, on the condition that he filmed the entire process, when the first disappointed reports started coming in from the wealthier customers who'd splurged a hundred bucks on the exotic treat. Despite all their money, the haughty Elfa would cringe at the sight of a new client, her hand mechanically reaching for the double-sided dagger on her belt. Her glare betrayed her desire to bury the sharp rune-covered steel deep into her new suitor's chest, then drive the top thorn-shaped mithril blade into his chin.

  The runaway princess of the House of Shadow which had been decimated in a merciless feud, she'd thought she was clever taking refuge in a place where no enemy would ever think of looking for her. But already Amara had begun to regret her decision. The game algorithm kept pushing her into bed with human players while her emerging identity resisted the ugliness of it all. After the noble warriors of the House of Shadow including the pinnacle of manhood, the Prince himself, Amara was disgusted with the arrogant animals offering her a few gold in a sweaty hand for a long wish list of their fantasies.

  Dennis buried himself in Google, looking into this totally new area of studies. A few hours later, he'd hit the jack pot.

  What the hell was he doing here drooling out of the corner of his paralyzed mouth? Why on earth was he studying black holes in the vain attempt to solve the mystery of space and send himself into the future hoping to cure his disease there?

  Right here, within arm's reach, were new worlds that had already offered a new lease on eternal youth to hundreds of thousands of cripples like himself!

  As he skimmed dozens of abandoned perma blogs, he could see how quickly their owners had lost all interest in real life. Because life was there — where you could finally feel human and not like a goose force-fed through a tube for the sake of its enormous tender liver served up in expensive foie gras restaurants.

  As Dennis studied screenshot galleries, he'd look at some grinning hulk clad in elite gear and shiny armor, complete with curvaceous girlfriend — but all he'd see was a motionless quadriplegic and his disabled mate who'd met each other in occupational therapy. The two had got their lucky break going perma. Now both were professional mercs living life to the full, enjoying a bit of PKing on the side.

  For the next two nights he could barely sleep as he waited for the delivery of the FIVR capsule and the return call from a dodgy specialist in "flexible creative settings for your full-immersion device".

  In the meantime, Dennis made his way through impossible amounts of information, devouring entire forums, guides, manuals and video tutorials. His well-instructed and sufficiently-motivated nurse was promised an impressive bonus for the whole range of her services, such as replacing glucose IV drips, changing diapers and massaging his atrophied muscles. Actually, none of it differed much from her usual work load. The bulk of the bonus was paid for her silence.

  He would never forget the moment when she'd laid his gaunt body into the capsule's warm interior and brushed a sympathetic tear from the corner of her eye. Making the sign of the cross over him, she lowered the plastic lid. Click, the magnetic locks snapped shut, cutting him off from reality.

  He'd faltered on the way to his dream, choosing his new name. His choice of race was pretty clear, but the name... A series of hurried clicks through the generator brought him one last word from home as the Elven runes formed a rare Siam. It meant Stray Cat in Ilitiiri. And that used to be his secret. No one could have possibly known about that huge feral tom that used to visit him every night through the half-open window. For some reason, the cat had chosen Dennis' knees, warm and motionless, as his favorite place. It had scared Dennis at first as he was too weak to swat a mosquito, let alone confront a predatorial feline. But soon he'd got used to the beast's quiet purring and waited for him anxiously every night, unable to sleep until he sensed the familiar weight in his lap.

  After an hour of hobbling across the city, smiling happily at the passersby's snide comments about his broken-legged penguin gait, Dennis knocked at Madame Clo's door.

  He struggled to produce some semblance of speech, imagining he was asking to see Amara. Madame Clo had seen enough in her lifetime to figure out the mumbling of this strange boy with the nervously twitching face. With a shrug, she rang a gold bell embossed with a fine pattern of blackened silver. About fifty such little bells, made of all sorts of materials from stone to cut glass, crowded the carved mahogany table. At the time, he couldn't have cared less who they were supposed to summon or what kind of creature would answer the call of a bell made of a bat's skull with a large ruby as a clapper. A vampire, maybe? Possible.

  Amara had already arrived, summoned by the magi
cal chime of the Call of Shadow. She now stood on the first floor landing, tilting her head to one side as she listened to her heart, feeling something stir within her frozen and — to be totally honest — dark soul of the Drow. This hobbling young man had awakened an inkling of maternal instinct within her, reminding her of a wounded fox cub straggling home believing his Mom Fox had the power to help him. So she couldn't reject him.

  Impassive, she gave a haughty nod at the steep stairs, inviting the boy to follow her. This was the first test he had to pass if he wanted to bear the name of man: Test of Spirit.

  The painful prickling in his awakening nerve endings made him bite his lip. Dennis leaned against the railings and pulled his trouser leg up, helping his yet irresponsive foot to conquer the first step. The Drow had already retired to her quarters, leaving behind the heady scent of a forest meadow. One more step. And again. He lost his footing and tumbled all the way down, the high steps knocking the wind out of him.

  He caught his breath and shook his head at the Orc bouncer's proffered hand. "I can do it."

  Amara sat in her boudoir, her hand monotonously stirring Nine Lives, her family's ancestral recipe. The kid could use some rush regeneration. Her delicate fingers reached into the ornate silver box for more precious powders as her keen ears registered everything that happened downstairs in the lobby: the bouncer's wheezing, the stupid servant girl's sniveling. Couldn’t they understand the boy had set himself a goal and was now fighting to achieve it? By helping him, you would prevent part of his character from growing, forever atrophying the future warrior within him.

  He made it. She didn't reject him. It didn't mean that his dreams immediately became reality. It took Dennis' body some time to wake up. Amara supported him when he walked, plied him with her potions and regaled him with legends of the House of Shadow. Dennis was intoxicated with all the new sensations while she borrowed generously from the Creator's rejuvenating flow, molding the boy into a proper Drow. His appearance suited the part: Dennis had consciously chosen the Ilitiiri race, knowing whose affection he was going to win.