Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4) Page 4

  He didn't at all mind being shaped into a noble Dark Warrior. More importantly, his hands were finally able to touch the beautiful Elfa; his lips could whisper the words of love. Other body parts too seemed to have awoken from their comatose slumber, impatient to join in the action.

  Now I understood where my Master Analyst had gotten his noble demeanor and his posh accents. Watching his regal poise made me want to stand up straight, too. If you had been lucky enough to have been granted the gift of walking, then do so — don't shuffle along stooping like some weak-willed dork. Millions of handicapped people would do anything to be able to take even a single step, so you'd better start appreciating what you have. Try to grow a spine already — it'll only do you good, helping you confront circumstances and keep your head up high.

  I'd no idea when his feelings had become mutual. It might have coincided with the girl's finally going perma. The few remaining strings had snapped, allowing the puppet — or rather, the Non-Player Character Amara0092 — to ignore program commands and requests.

  And I'd be the last one to judge the kid. When I watched my men drool at the sounds of her cooing Elven laughter as they ogled the perfect Drow body revealed by her hugging garments, I realized that soon there'd be more female clan members coming. Our analyst wasn't going to remain a happy exception for much longer.

  I only smiled sadly, remembering Princess Ruata. How naïve could they be? In the meantime, my soldiers' gold kept flowing into many delicate but strong female hands. As the all-seeing Lurch reported, even the castle servant girls hadn't been forgotten. The atmosphere of a spring rut filled the ancient walls with vibes of love and desire. If it went on like this, soon we'd hear the sounds of antlers clashing coming from the Arena. As if I didn't have enough problems to contend with.

  But as for Dennis, he'd ended up enjoying the full support of the House of Shadow. Already a month after his going perma, he had arrived at the mercs' guild wearing the previously unknown set of quest armor of a House's Officer. His level 140 landed him his initial position of a platoon commander while his unique IQ had soon taken him to the staff cadre of the Copperhead squad. Their successful mission rate had soared, raising the mercs' overall ranking to previously unknown heights. The Guild's administration didn't waste time singling out the key factor in this sudden rise of a historically mediocre squad and offered Dennis a year's contract in the capacity of staff analyst. It was this contract I had now been forced to pay, cancellation fees and all.

  Dennis hadn't hesitated to accept the offer of heading my newborn analytics department. It wasn't the kind of information that his mind would struggle to process. I didn't skimp on relocation allowance, offering him a large third-floor apartment in the donjon and five hundred universal points to do it up in style.

  Those points, if the truth were known, were the only things I regretted parting with. Five hundred was the equivalent of what the entire castle produced in twenty-four hours, enough to restore ten meters of outer walls. But an expert analyst cost more than even an entire tower fully manned and complete with siege turrets.

  The last freebies he'd got from me were the right to bring a family member and a senior officer's share of raid loot: 1% of net profits and priority choice of trophies. At the time I'd known nothing about his wife yet — and understandably I tended not to trust the Drow that much.

  I had to admit that Amara's presence had brightened up the castle. She created a new trend in relationships and gradually became an expert in her own right. The clan's numerous departments were desperate for a liaison officer — a position that came naturally to the girl. Immediately in demand, she began allowing herself certain liberties, starting a collection of snide remarks from the numerous movies she watched.

  Here I need to finally mention television, a.k.a. the zombie box, the invention of which had shattered AlterWorld just as much as the arrival of tobacco. While regular players couldn't care less about it, television had produced a nostalgia epidemic among the permas, forcing them to stare for hours at poor-quality holograms.

  Some could finally catch up with the latest soccer championship, others gorged on the recent Hollywood blockbusters while yet others revisited good old comedy flicks.

  I, too, had been forced to install three public-access 3D boxes in the castle's halls. In the evenings, Harlequin and his crew lodged themselves in the Small Hall watching all sorts of cartoons till the early hours. Sometimes their noisy goblin crowd would dissolve into a howling protest which meant that the Hell Hounds were back from their daily hunt and in for their nightly dose of Pluto with whom they identified with all the passion of their infernal hearts.

  The fight over the right to watch TV ended predictably every time, with the slapping sounds of powerful paws and the scared patter of tiny goblin feet. Then later in the night when everyone was fast asleep, the zombie box would go on again, filling the castle with the sounds of a scratchy old-fashioned soundtrack,

  Winnie the Pooh,

  Winnie the Pooh,

  Tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff;

  He's Winnie the Pooh,

  Winnie the Pooh,

  Willy nilly silly old bear...

  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 t
he 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 th
is 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

  The 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.