The Lag (The Game Master: Book #1) (23 page)

The outline of the exosuit bled through the cloud. Beast was backing off, peppering the remaining goblins with purple fire.

Way to go, buddy! Attila dashed for the gate. Beast, too, turned round and clanged his massive steely legs, following in his wake. A whole group of flat gnoll-like targets jumped out of the floor to one side of him; he pointed his flamethrower hand at them, showering them with fire. The cheap plywood went up in flames.

Attila was the first to reach the gate. A strip of cool light lay across his face. Squinting, he pushed the heavy gates open. The hinges creaked.

A small yard outside was surrounded by a stone wall. Beyond lay the buildings of Deadville. The sun was hiding behind the ominous blue and purple thunderclouds that sped across the sky.

Beast had only a few paces left when Attila noticed a flat gray rock in his friend's way which looked suspiciously like a discharged Catapult. He had a bad feeling about it. Too late though — he didn't have a chance to warn Beast before he trod with his heavy foot onto the rock.

With a crackling sound, the exosuit swayed. Beast bellowed as he staggered, losing his balance, and rammed the gate with his head. A bell-like sound of metal hitting metal echoed throughout the hall.

"Bummer!" Beast roared, collapsing by the gate in an avalanche of clanging and clattering. "Such a race ruined!"

He scrambled back to his feet and barged through the gate. Behind them shadows flitted amid the trees, growling.

"Bar the gate!" Attila put his weight against it.

Beast followed suit. The gates of the Dwarven test range snapped shut like a pair of giant jaws.

"P
lease put the helmets on. In a few moments we will commence data transfer."

The woman in the red suit took a long pause. Then she turned and nodded to a man in a lab coat who sat behind her at a table groaning with equipment. His fingers fluttered across the keyboard.

Yanna hovered in the doorway, checking the room for any guards but found none. What she did find, however, was another open door in the hall's opposite wall. Which explained why she hadn't noticed the change in the VIP visitors at once.

The guests slammed their helmets on, their visors still open. A pink light came on inside them. Yanna could see the faces of those sitting close to her. They shifted in their seats for a while; then they stopped moving, staring ahead of them. A few faces relaxed into stupid smiles; others frowned.

Then all eyes rolled into the backs of their heads, turning into blind white pingpong balls.

Yanna bit her lip and stepped into the hall. She walked quickly along the wall, turned a corner and headed for the door visible behind the back-row seats. The woman in red stopped talking to the operator. She must have detected the movement out of the corner of her eye as she turned her head to Yanna but didn't dare call out for fear of disturbing the audience.

Hugging the laptop, Yanna kept going. Most of the visitors sat motionless in their helmets — but not everyone. One woman in an evening dress was making jerky movements with her arms, her clenched fists battering the armrests louder and louder. A man in an expensive suit was shaking his head, turning it left and right, left and right...

That's Alpha learning to control people in the real world
, Yanna thought. To her surprise, she felt almost calm
. Total control, that's what he needs. For him, Gryad is only a test ground where he can study people's mentality and their behavior in the extreme environment of the Lag.

She was almost two-thirds of the way across the hall when the door behind her swung open. Baboon Face barged in, accompanied by three of the guards. At that very moment, a good half of the trance-like guests transformed: some of them dropped to the floor while others jumped to their feet; a few people squirmed in their seats.

The woman in red opened her mouth, about to speak, when Baboon cut her short, "Stop or I'll shoot!"

A stout man in a corner seat tried to stop Yanna, all his movements mechanical and stiff. He grabbed at her lab coat. Another rose, reaching his arms out for her. Yanna squirmed free of the first one's weak grip, slammed the laptop's corner into the other's throat and rammed the door with her shoulder as the stomping of feet grew behind her back.

She shot out of the room into a short corridor leading to an indoor balcony that overhung the building's reception hall. A dainty narrow staircase led down to the floor below. A security guard hovered on the top step, making sure no mere mortals ventured into the VIP area.

He stared at Yanna bug-eyed. "Excuse me!" he attempted to reach for her elbow but the surprise effect worked against him. Yanna slid past the open-mouthed man, flew down the steps and wormed herself into the crowd below. Unhappy voices rose around her; someone pushed her aside. Elbowing through the crowd, Yanna hurried toward the exit.

She'd done it! She had the laptop and she was out safely! There's the door, just within her reach...

Someone grabbed her hand.

Yanna swung round. The ginger-haired guard — the one who'd let her in in the first place — was holding her tight.

"I've been looking for you everywhere," he began. His expression grew puzzled. "Why are you wearing a doctor's coat? Is this our uniform underneath?"

"No, I just..." Yanna glanced back and blurted, unexpectedly for herself, "Bagrov's been attacked!"

"He what?"

"You see those people on the stairs? Disguised as guards? There're more of them upstairs killing the VIP guests! Terrorists or robbers, I don't know!"

Ginger let go of her and bolted toward Baboon Face who'd just appeared on the steps. As he ran, he pulled out a walkie talkie, shouting into it.

The few seconds it took was enough for Yanna to slip outside.

The city was in turmoil. Ambulances and police cars sped past her. A chopper with the markings of the Ministry of Emergencies hovered overhead. The protestors' crowd had grown considerably. Having run down the steps, Yanna found herself in its midst.

She hurried toward the curb just as a young guy pulled up on his brightly colored scooter. He wore a shirt of an intense blue color and a pair of leather pants. His dreadlocks too were dyed blue under a helmet printed with the Union Jack. He chomped noisily on his gum. A digital player was taped to the handlebars. A set of speakers mounted on the front forks blurted out reggae music, drowning out the city noise. He really looked like some space junkie but Yanna didn't care. She stepped toward him and glistened her eyes meaningfully:
Take me for a ride?

The kid stood up proudly, checking her out, and nodded at the back seat.

She took it and clasped the kid around the waist, realizing only now she was still wearing the lab coat. She must have looked well and truly weird.

"Where to?" the kid shouted over his shoulder. "What's the address?"

"In a moment! Just go!"

He was about to pull off when Baboon ran out of the building followed by the ginger-haired guard and a few men in black. They immediately singled out Yanna's white coat in the crowd and made a dash for her, forcing their way through the ranks of protestors. She heard indignant voices.

"Who are they?" the reggae lover wondered, casting a look back.

"Just go!"

He leaned forward, clinging to the bars, then turned the throttle and nearly wheelied as he gave the scooter gas. They made a sharp curve and entered the busy traffic. Baboon and Ginger ran toward the road, waving their hands trying to stop a passing car, throwing themselves literally under the wheels of the honking vehicles.

Attila and Beast stood on the roof of a gloomy angular structure. Attila could never understand the game designers' idea behind Deadville's buildings: rows of dark windowless towers forming a skyline of cubes, pyramids and rectangular blocks. Not a single window between them. Why would you need a house without windows? What purpose would it serve? There was always one stairwell inside each of them: a long echoing tunnel zigzagging all the way up to the roof in a succession of straight lines. No frills whatsoever, everything purely functional. The only exception was a recurring statue cut in the buildings' walls: the torso of a man with his hands raised overhead as if supporting the roof. Only the torso, arms and head but no legs. The man had no face either, just a flat stone surface. The statue was spooky, striking as something created by a malicious mind devoid of anything human.

The other weird thing was that the local stone had reflective properties. It wasn't shiny like a looking glass but rather like well-polished metal, mirroring dull and blurred outlines of other buildings around. The resulting picture was weird and ugly — not pleasant to behold. If you crouched on the roof, you too could see the reflection of your face — and it didn't look quite right, either. It was still you but not quite yourself. It felt like looking through a thick slab of something that exposed your secret nature, turning you into a hungry-eyed serial killer.

They had climbed the building in order to get their bearings. The exit from the Dwarven test range now lay far behind. The dwarves hadn't ventured outside after them. Most likely, the soulless Engineers under the Mountain simply couldn't exist on the surface so that even Alpha couldn't change their preprogrammed nature. Once Attila and Beast had left their aggro zone by exiting the caves, the dwarves stopped chasing them.

Now they stood on the roof's edge, looking at the city. The wind howled all around them, tousling their hair and beating their faces. This was almost like back in real life. The ragged clouds revealed patches of sky, crimson and swollen, then sealed them again — a bit like wounds did when you drank a magic elixir.

"So! I observe no armies of the Dark," Beast rubbed his screechy gauntleted hands. "Behind the trees over there, is it River Castle? Can't see anyone there, either. Looks like the Pioneers haven't received our message, man. No one's arrived."

"Not good," Attila answered. "This could only mean that everything's lost."

"Not necessarily. We can always try and get inside the Citadel, the two of us. I'd love to know where Wayfarer is. If he's dead, you can kiss our money goodbye. I did ask him to give me the password, didn't I?"

Beast walked along the edge, studying the streets below. Deadville had virtually no vegetation. It was as if greenery was afraid of this place or simply wasn't able to survive here.

"D'you know the city's story?" Beast asked, turning back. "It appeared out of nowhere. One night a thunderstorm began and there was this huge flash of lightning reaching from the Citadel all the way here — so in the morning, the city just stood here. No one inside. From what I hear, the Highlanders have a name for this statue guy — He Who Has No Face, or so their clan wizards call him. When the Highlanders first moved to River Castle, they wanted to mine this stone: it has some very special magic, apparently. They wanted to pulverize it or whatever, hoping to craft it. They organized an expedition and even bought a whole load of equipment from the dwarves. Didn't work. Either they couldn't cut a single piece of it or the expedition perished, I can't remember. It's been a while. But you can still see the reflections of the expedition members if you look at the walls. They're sort of locked inside. And they change over time. They don't look like humans any more — or like Elves, I don't really know which races the Highlanders accept. They're all pale and spooky and they look almost the same. Apart from them, there's not a soul in the city — not a monster or animal in sight. This is an empty city, man. Lifeless. Doomed. D'ja hear me? Attila? It's empty, apart from Him Who Has No Face."

"It might be that the script writers wanted the city to have arrived from a different reality. The one that's sort of," Attila waved his hand in the air, "a totalitarian one."

"Why totalitarian?"

"Just a thought. Some world that has succumbed to the power of a horrible necromancer. He might have even turned the townspeople's minds into one collective mind, symbolized by this statue."

Attila could have sworn that Beast had shuddered under that exosuit of his. "You've got some sick imagination, man! I wouldn't want to live there."

Far south, past the river and its castle, beyond the towering poplars and a large field, Attila could just make out the outline of the Citadel. An enormous vertical eye rotated slowly over the Conclave Tower. What was it, really? This had to be some truly powerful magic. Was it the Eye of the Alpha Ray with which he could see everything that happened for miles around? The Citadel itself was a complex maze of large and small buildings, towers and defensive walls; he could see light blinking against the chaos of black granite, bright flashes coming on and going out. Definitely of magic origin even though Attila had no idea what that might be.

He sat down onto the cold stone roof and produced the Book. Beast clanked around, pacing the roof for a while, then walked back to him.

"I wonder if Alpha failed to gather his army in time? We can't see any Pioneers but we can't see his mobs, either. Should we really try and sneak in, the two of us? On the quiet, you know."

"I'm sure some of his mobs have arrived," Attila said. "There's no way we can sneak in. Otherwise everyone and their grandmother would have done it already."

The steel disk of God's Eye soared out of his bag, unfolding its star-like arms. It hovered over the roof for a while, then began floating sideways. Attila kept turning the crystal knobs, controlling it. He just didn't seem to be able to fine-tune it. All the close objects looked perfectly in focus on the Book's screen while all the far-off ones blurred in the distance. Besides, the Eye seemed to slightly deviate from the route he'd laid out for it. Attila's invention was definitely glitchy and not in the best of shape... just like its creator. His body was glitchy too like a mauled mechanism: its filters blocked, its parts missing.

"Right," Beast pointed his flame thrower hand at the river. "Let's go to the River Castle. We don't have any other option, anyway. Am I right?"

"We don’t have contact with Yanna, either. We have no idea yet what she's managed — or not managed — to achieve. I sent her my address but as I don't feel any better yet, it means that she... I'm not even sure she
can
do anything. Can she help me without removing the suit? She could at least give me a glucose injection if she drops in at the pharmacy on her way. She could in theory even hook me up to an IV drip. The suit has a special socket on the sleeve to do that. And I'm still sick which means she hasn't been to my apartment yet and it's only a couple of blocks away from RussoVirt. What on earth could have happened to her?"

Beast reached his mechanical arm out to scratch his head. His steel gauntlet slammed against his helmet. "All right, so what do you suggest?"