Edda (15 page)

“No, Princess.”

“Strange.”

Ambassador matched her shrug with one of his own and put the ring down beside the dagger.

“You want me to work with this?”

“We want you to know of it. But the gun is the priority.” Lord Scanthax leaned forward and scooped up the pistol in his large hand. “This is a powerful weapon. Suppose a hundred people from Saga had a gun like this and a ring like that. They could walk invisible all the way to the castle and then destroy every one of us. Once I and all the manifestations were extinguished, your own life would be at an end, too.”

Penelope could understand his anxiety, but the scenario just described by Lord Scanthax raised concerns of her own. “That reminds me. When can you give me control of the systems keeping my human body alive?”

Ambassador gestured toward the gun that Lord Scanthax was holding. “It will be done as a reward for your learning to script weapons like these.”

Penelope nodded. True enough, that was the deal—although it might be some time before she could deliver on her part of it, and she needed control over the life-support system as soon as possible; not because she really took seriously the idea of an invisible group of assassins making their way to the castle from Saga, but because she had plans to leave Edda and search for the avatars of humans in the other worlds. Lord Scanthax would thwart such plans so long as he had control of her physical body.

“Very well.” She changed the subject. “Here’s another mystery that I’m sure you have thought about. How does it come about that a person from a high-technology world like Saga has magic items that look like they come from Myth?”

Again, Lord Scanthax looked to Scout for an answer.

“Well,” the woman began in her quiet voice, “we were discussing it earlier. There seem to be a number of possibilities. The worst case is that Saga has both sophisticated technology and powerful magic.” From the corner of her eye, Penelope saw Ambassador give a glum nod. “Another possibility is that the person from Saga was simply fortunate enough to find the ring or be given it as they journeyed through Myth.” Scout glanced at the map. “There are still many pockets of indigenous life remaining in Myth. Perhaps they met one of the last lords or ladies of that world and formed an alliance.”

“Is that likely? I thought you killed them all?”

“Nearly all of them. But to judge from their records, we still have to eliminate at least one, called Anadia, and perhaps another, Jodocus, a criminal among them who disappeared some time ago. And there may be more who were not mentioned in the documents we have studied so far. I have most of my scouts at work in Myth, but there are great swathes of forest, swamp, and mountain that someone could hide in for as long as they wished.”

“So, Princess,” Lord Scanthax cut in, “we need those guns from you quickly. We also need a method of identifying the invisible assailants. And”—disconcertingly, he smiled at her; Lord Scanthax had not been designed to smile much and the expression was rather ogreish—“if you can script us those rings, we could launch our attack on Saga by sending through a few hundred invisible troops to establish a beachhead.”

Penelope leaned back with a sigh. “You know I’ve never been able to do anything with magic. It is impossible to even make a start. I simply haven’t a clue how those items were scripted. Perhaps creating magic items is not too difficult—who knows? But until we find some manuals to get me going, it’s hopeless. The gun, I might be able to do in time, but even there I need to read up more about lasers.”

The three manifestations looked rather unhappy, and wearily, Scout took a seat at last.

“Still, cheer up. We might not need magic to protect against invisible assassins.”

“No?” asked Lord Scanthax.

Penelope reached for the ring and gave it back to Ambassador.

“Here, put this on and hold out your hand.”

Once Ambassador was invisible, she felt around until she was holding his outstretched arm in her left hand. Then, picking up a quill with her right, Penelope flicked ink onto his invisible fingers. For a moment the ink clearly delineated the hand, but then it, too, disappeared.

“Rats. Scratch that idea.”

“But still, Princess, your experiment has its value. Suppose I arrange for paint, or even just water, to pour down constantly in front of each gate,” mused Lord Scanthax aloud. “Then, when someone passes through the disturbance in the flow, it will be visible. If the guard units are set to respond, they’ll be able to get off a round or two.” He nodded with a certain satisfaction. “I’ll inform Engineer and my officers as soon as we are done here.”

“What else do we need to discuss?” asked Penelope. Not that she was in any hurry to return to scripting; rather, looking at the invisibility ring had given her an idea. A very exciting idea. One of the great advantages of being human was that her involuntary responses were hidden by the passivity of her avatar. Her avatar was perfectly composed, while her human body would have betrayed her with sweat, with nervous movements of her eyes, and with flushes spreading across her body, driven by a pounding heart. Her voice, however, could still let her down, so Penelope strove to maintain her normal tone and steer her thoughts away from the ring.

“Can you close Gate Four?” Lord Scanthax leaned toward her, to emphasize the urgency of the question. “Can you prevent more units from crossing out of Saga until we are ready to attack them?”

Penelope shook her head. “As I told you before I even created Gate One, these are not like real doors. They are more like tears in the fabric of the world. It’s like I cut the sky open.”

“I remember,” said Ambassador in his most agreeable tone of voice, “but isn’t there a way to sew it back together?”

“No . . . well, not that I know of. It’s not like cutting cloth; there is no give, no stretch—just the immovable edges of a void.”

“Can you fill it then—the space?” Ambassador nodded for her, willing her to say yes.

“Yes, I can,” she responded, nodding in kind. “But that won’t close it off to the adjacent world. I could cover the gate with iron, or something stronger. But even then, if someone fired this kind of weapon through the gate, they would eventually melt whatever I put there.”

Another unhappy silence.

“Ambassador has told me of your efforts yesterday, to leave your apartments and travel to the library.”

“Yes?”

“It cost us a great deal of energy to bring your body back.”

“Ah. I apologize for that; my muscles were weaker than I supposed.”

“And you do appreciate the risks? If your suit had torn on a snag, you probably would have died.”

“I didn’t know of the damage to the corridor. The risks are far greater than I previously appreciated. I will not attempt such a journey again until I am fit enough to do so safely.” Penelope’s voice was nearly as steady as the placid expression on her avatar.

“Very well.” Lord Scanthax stood up. “We won’t detain you further. Take the gun—please.” His voice suddenly changed, becoming less brusque as he remembered that he was supposed to be civil toward her. “And try to script us some weapons as effective as these, as soon as you possibly can.”

“I certainly will.” She stood up, took up the gun, and then, as casually as possible, picked up the ring. “Shall I take a look at this, too? Just in case it gives me any ideas?”

It seemed to Penelope that Scout was watching her suspiciously and it was Scout who responded first. “It was decided to allocate the ring and the dagger to Assassin.”

“Righto. Tell him I have it for study and will send a servant unit to him with it early tomorrow.” With that she strode from the room, ring firmly grasped in her fist. Penelope did not pause to see whether the others looked surprised or simply accepted her announcement as reasonable. Closing the door behind her, she gave a little dance. A ring of invisibility! It was exactly what she needed to cross through the gates without notice. If she left at once, she could do so before Engineer constructed any curtains of water.

Chapter 15

BREATHLESS IN ANGUISH

Once back in
her tower, Penelope went straight to a large and highly decorated chest of drawers whose black wooden top was covered in carvings of people in western clothing enacting scenes from some long-lost epic. Like so much of the castle’s furniture, the chest was an item brought back from a fallen enemy by Lord Scanthax’s victorious soldiers. Kneeling down in front of the drawers, Penelope pulled the bottom one out completely. This allowed her to reach inside and touch the base of the chest. She didn’t need to see her fingers in order to script an opening through the wood and reach a secret hollowed-out area: a hidden drawer packed with everything she thought might be useful on a journey. There she had stashed maps to the gates; a compass; a sharp knife; some jewels; bronze, silver, and gold coins; a pair of binoculars; a pistol and clips with fifty bullets; a mirror; and so on. All these potentially useful objects were stored in a satchel that had a number of small additional items in its internal pockets, such as needle and thread, but she couldn’t recall exactly what she’d laid away.

More than a year had passed since Penelope had hidden the bag: twelve months in which she often mused on the problem of how she could leave the castle on her own and explore the worlds beyond Edda for herself. Of course, she had often journeyed through them, but always in the company of one of the manifestations of Lord Scanthax and several soldier units. If Penelope could have one wish granted, it would be a simple one: her greatest goal in life was only to be given the chance to talk to other humans. The most likely way to realize that ambition was to enter the other worlds and seek out intelligent constructs in the hope that some of them were avatars for humans—or, if not, would at least know where humans could be found. But, tightly guarded by a squad of Lord Scanthax’s soldiers, she had been given no license to roam and no opportunity to talk to anyone, human or electronic.

Even when her loyalty to her surrogate father had been high, Penelope had been immensely discontented—to the point of having her first rebellious thoughts—that she had not been allowed into the newly discovered worlds in search of humans, or, indeed, to enjoy the pure fun of being an explorer. And the injustice hit the eight-year-old girl especially hard, because it was only due to the fact that Penelope could see beyond the world of Edda that Epic had been discovered in the first place.

While clipped up to Edda, Penelope usually ran a series of background monitoring options, designed to measure the quality of her connection, warn her if there was any danger of lag, and suggest what measures to take if there was. Once, while doing some scripting on a bridge over a high waterfall, she had been surprised by one of the monitors suddenly flashing orange. The latency between her human body and that of the avatar was perfectly normal, but the amount of data flow between her and Edda at this point had more than doubled. It had taken months of curious investigation, but Penelope eventually realized that at this fairly remote point in Edda it was possible to pick up signals that simultaneously carried information about two worlds: Edda and an entirely new one.

On hearing the news, Lord Scanthax was positively euphoric; he had even attempted to give Penelope a hug. She’d given him a purpose once more, the purpose for which he was made: the conquest of a world. Lord Scanthax immediately began to reassemble his decommissioned army. When Penelope explained that to cut a route from Edda to this new data stream was an irreversible act, Lord Scanthax had taken the point seriously. He did not instruct her to go ahead until a vast army of high-quality troops had been gathered at the waterfall.

Edda, Epic, Ruin, Myth, and now Saga. Each of these electronic worlds had existed for decades with their own servers on their own planets to sustain them. And the game worlds were adjacent to each other in a linear fashion, presumably reflecting the existence of a chain of satellite links between the respective planets on which their servers were based. Penelope had discovered a considerable degree of overlap between each of the other games and its neighbor, enough that she could create the gates that opened the way from one to the next relatively near to one another.

It was surprising that the existence of Epic, Ruin, Myth, and Saga was not apparent to her from the first time she clipped up to Edda. But the humans who left Edda had deleted all references to the existence of other electronic worlds from their records. Not even Lord Scanthax knew about them, and if it had not been for Penelope, he—or whoever won the scramble for domination in Edda—probably would never have known about these other worlds. Perhaps the people who tried to hide the other worlds were wise and would think it was unfortunate that a human baby had remained behind when they left the planet, to survive and enter into Edda. Maybe Penelope had accidentally betrayed the goals of her species, for, one after the other, Lord Scanthax had destroyed each of the worlds that Penelope had opened a link to, at least until now, with the discovery of Saga.

If there had been avatars of humans in Ruin, Epic, or Myth, they had been killed along with any self-aware electronic life-forms. Lord Scanthax claimed he had spoken with captives after battles on Penelope’s behalf, asking after the presence of humans, but she didn’t believe him. Ever since he conquered Edda, Lord Scanthax hadn’t bothered with prisoners. Whether humans ever created new avatars and came back to visit these depopulated and conquered worlds, she couldn’t say, but if Saga was a vibrant and fully functional environment, it could well be that humans were present there in great numbers.

The recently created gate to Saga, currently the source of widespread apprehension in Lord Scanthax and his manifestations, could be Penelope’s last chance to find other humans, at least before he found a way to conquer the new world, too. What a wonder it would be, to find a human community, to meet other people of her kind after living for so many years under the joyless scrutiny of Lord Scanthax and his equally cold manifestations. So strong was her desire for the company of other people that Penelope could hardly allow herself to daydream about it, because the longer she was alone, the more unbearable the thought became that humans were out there somewhere, playing games, conversing, falling in love, becoming intimate.

No matter what he owed her, Lord Scanthax would never let Penelope’s avatar escape him and explore Saga on her own. And while Penelope had prepared everything she needed for such an expedition, until today it had seemed like wishful thinking. At every gate between the worlds, Lord Scanthax had guards who would not let her through. But now, with the ring of invisibility, there was a chance she could make it all the way to Saga. And it was a chance she was determined to take.

Before she took up her preprepared satchel and left the castle, Penelope had to change the clothes her avatar was wearing. A princess’s dress was not the most practical outfit to go marching off in. Again, she had thought about this some time ago, and in an adjacent closet, there were much more suitable clothes waiting for her journey. She undid her corset at the back, her movements swift and exact. Then she untied the three layers of her skirt and stepped from the pile of fallen garments as though from a purple cocoon. Her transformation was from colorful butterfly to dull caterpillar. Penelope’s travel clothes were plain: dark trousers; a navy-colored, longsleeved cotton undershirt; a plain gray overshirt; and an army jacket from Ruin. The jacket might disguise her a little—as a messenger, perhaps—but the real point of wearing it was its functionality; it was covered in pockets and made of strong material. Next, she tied her hair in a long ponytail, pulled over her left shoulder, and wedged a Ruin army cap on her head. Lastly, she pulled on a fine pair of black leather boots, which came up to just below her knees. All set? No, she needed to stuff her old skirts and bodice down in the secret drawer and push the bottom drawer back in on top of them. Once that was done, deliberately slowing her breathing, Penelope took one last measured look around the room to check that nothing was amiss. This was no time to become giddy with excitement and make a mistake. Satisfied that she had left no evidence of her departure, Penelope put on the ring and slipped out to the corridor.

Was she invisible? It was impossible to tell; as far as she was concerned, she looked the same as ever, even in reflections. For example, the glass in front of a tall grandfather clock served as an effective mirror. She admired her new look—very adventurous—but it seemed to make no difference if she removed the ring or put it on again. The slow, regular series of clicks from the mechanism in the dark chamber beyond the glass reminded her that time was passing and prompted her to move on. There was still one more thing she had to do before she left the castle. Penelope hurried along the castle corridors and up the curved staircase of a round tower to her laboratory. Again she had planned ahead. Inserted in the pages of a large, dusty volume at the bottom of a pile of books was a piece of parchment with large black lettering: “Delicate work in progress. DO NOT DISTURB FOR ANY REASON.” That should keep out most of the castle units. Only Ambassador—if he had sufficiently good reason—would dare interrupt when faced with that message. Before pinning the note to the door, Penelope lit several slow-burning incense sticks. They would be long spent before she was even through Gate One, but perhaps their scent would linger and give the impression that there was indeed some activity taking place in the workroom.

Pressing her note into place on the ironclad door and turning the clunky lock with a key that she then placed in one of her jacket pockets, Penelope hurried back down the stairs, trying to keep the tapping sound of her boots on the stone to a minimum. Soon she was back in carpeted hallways and it was easy enough to move in near silence.

Halfway down the corridor that led to the entrance stairwell, a servant unit came out from a door and began walking toward her. For a moment Penelope’s heart sank, thinking that she had been observed and that her unusual dress and presence here might be reported, depending on how intelligent the unit was. But then she remembered the ring and waited. The servant was walking on the other side of the corridor, so she moved quietly across into his path. Step after step brought him toward her, and there was no sign that he sensed someone was in his way. At last, when he was only four paces away and moving resolutely onward, she stepped across the corridor again, on tiptoe. The servant swept past her, appearing not to notice her at all. It worked! The ring really did work. For the first time since she committed herself to this venture, Penelope actually believed she might succeed.

There were a number of ways out of the castle, apart from walking across the courtyard and crossing the drawbridge under the gatehouse. After the military threat to Lord Scanthax from rivals in Edda had ended, the moat had been drained and this meant that a small postern gate that had once been below the waterline was now usable. Penelope descended the badly lit stone stairwell that led down to the gate and was shocked to find two soldier units standing there. The doorway had not been guarded two years ago, when she came down to check that her keys worked on the padlock. The soldiers were looking at her, animated, perhaps, in response to her unguarded footsteps. Delicately, quietly, she drew back, seeking out each step behind her without turning. A thousand curses on Lord Scanthax and Ambassador too! They must have become suspicious about her. Why else would they put guards at the old entrance? Or wait—perhaps it was because of their fears of invisible assassins from Saga? In any case, once she was sure the guards were not following her, she turned and left. Perhaps it would be best to sneak out over the drawbridge after all.

The courtyard was busy, and that suited her. Motorbikes, trucks, and horse riders were coming and going, creating considerable background noise. It was no bother skirting around the outside of the yard, with the castle wall on her left, pausing from time to time to let units move out of her way. A nervous moment came when she caught sight of Carpenter coming out of the stables ahead; he was one of the manifestations of Lord Scanthax with a reasonable degree of autonomy. But he didn’t even glance toward Penelope; the invisibility continued to shield her.

Once at the drawbridge, she watched as a cart approached from the castle courtyard, the iron-shod footfalls of the horses echoing out as they slapped down on the wood. It was perfect cover, and she took advantage of the opportunity, stepping immediately behind the cart as it passed, so close she could have touched the back of the wooden frame of the vehicle. Not one guard unit so much as moved its head. Now clear of the drawbridge and the guards on the far side, she let the cart continue on down the drive while she made for a cluster of bushes. So far, so good.

Being outside the castle gave Penelope a tremendous uplift, a feeling of happiness greater than any she had previously experienced. Freedom tasted sweet. The sensation was enhanced by the fact that it was a sunny afternoon; she had emerged from the shadows of the castle walls into the bright colors of summer fields. This close to the castle, the fields were mostly uncultivated pasture, whose bright green grass was dotted with clusters of blue speedwells, purple thistles, and yellow ragwort. Even under escort, she really ought to have come out here more often when they blossomed, just for a walk among these signs of life and growth. The dimly lit corridors and dingy rooms of the castle suddenly seemed unbearable.

Penelope ran for a while, letting the stamina levels of her avatar sink nearly all the way down to zero. It didn’t matter; she could recuperate while she worked. Safely out of sight of the castle, Penelope settled on some sandy ground beside a lone oak tree. There she began to script, using her human fingers inside their gloves to open the menus, selecting and drawing materials into existence in front of her, and using a huge variety of scripting subroutines to shape them. In the course of marching his armies across Ruin, Lord Scanthax had been impressed by the motorbikes of his enemies and desired them for himself as a means of speeding up communication between his troops. Until he conquered their factories, Lord Scanthax’s motorbikes had been Penelope’s creations. Having spent weeks scripting bikes for Lord Scanthax back then, Penelope could create a perfectly good motorbike with her eyes closed. More important, she could do so swiftly. In less than an hour it stood on its rests and back wheel, gleaming, perfect—except, perhaps, that it was a little too new looking. Still, by the time she reached the road, it would probably look like it had been around for years.