Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“How much has been Hidden?”

“You want that in gold pieces or—”

“Dollars.”

“About two million.”

“Holy Christ.”

“Another three million is lying on the ground.”

“That is just the last couple of days’ ransom money, you’re saying.”

“Yes,” Corvallis said, “but the drop rate is declining rapidly as the infection gets under control. Ninety percent of our users have now downloaded the security patch. So it’s not going to go much beyond that.”

“Okay,” Richard said, “so what is my situation, if I’m a da G shou? I know where two million dollars’ worth of gold pieces is Hidden but I have lost control of the territory where it’s stashed.”

“You have to sneak in,” Corvallis said, “and recover the stuff one stash at a time…”

“…and then sneak out and get to an MC without being ripped off,” Richard concluded. In the back of his mind, he was worrying about how he was going to explain this to John—definitely not a T’Rain kind of guy. “Which could actually be difficult to pull off, if the Torgai falls under the control of people who know what they’re doing. I mean, with that kind of money at stake, there would be plenty of financial incentive to set up a heavy security cordon.”

“A Weirding Ward costs about one gold piece per linear meter,” C-plus said, referring to a type of invisible force-field barrier that could be erected by sufficiently powerful sorcerers.

“Cheaper if you harvest the Filamentous Cobwebs yourself,” Richard retorted, referring to the primary ingredient needed to cast a Weirding Ward.

“Not as easy as you make it sound, given that the Caves of Ut’tharn just got placed under a Ban of Execration,” countered Corvallis, referring, respectively, to the best place to gather Filamentous Cobwebs and a powerful priestly spell.

“Who did that? Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up the last couple of days…”

“The High Pontiff of the Glades of Enthorion.”

“Sounds Earthtone to me.”

“You got it.”

“Some kind of strategic move in the Wor?”

“I’m not privy to the High Pontiff’s innermost thoughts.”

“Anyway,” Richard said, “that Ban wouldn’t prevent Earthtones from getting in there, if they were exempted from the Ban by a Frond of Peace that had been consecrated by the said Pontiff.”

“I forgot about the Frond of Peace loophole,” said Corvallis, crestfallen.

“It’s okay, you’re new here.”

C-plus considered it. “So you’re saying that Earthtones might actually have an advantage over Brights in seizing control of the Torgai.”

“Kind of,” Richard said.

Corvallis raised an eyebrow.

“More to the point,” Richard went on, “this gives us a way to encourage Earthtones. Make them think they have a chance of turning back those three thousand Bright K’Shetriae you mentioned, and getting control of the three million bucks’ worth of gold pieces that they can see —which would go a long ways toward financing the Wor.”

“Could you help me peel back the layers?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Of your Machiavellian strategy? Because I can see that there is way more calculation and cynicism going on here than I can ever possibly comprehend—”

“It’s simple,” Richard insisted. “There are all of about two layers. We have no way to track down the da G shou. Hell, forget about even tracking them down. We have no way to even gather more data about the little fuckers until we can get them to log on, right?”

“Right. Unless we get into bed with the Chinese police.”

“Yeah,” Richard scoffed, “which for reasons I won’t explain is now even less likely than it was yesterday. So. It seems from your graph that they are scared shitless and unwilling to log on. But they must be aware that they have two million bucks Hidden in the Torgai. Sooner or later, they’ll want to come after that money. If it so happens that the Torgai gets conquered by three thousand K’Shetriae, or whatever, who can use the money on the ground to put up all kinds of walls and wards and force fields and shit, and thereby lock out the da G shou, then the da lose all incentive to try to come back. They never log on. We never see them again. On the other hand, if we can keep things nicely unstable in the Torgai region, and turn it into a chaotic battleground, then that gives the da all sorts of opportunities to sneak back into the place and go rooting around for their Hidden gold…”

“And then they’ll pop up on the watch list,” said Corvallis, nodding, “and we can start gathering data on them.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe find the Liege Lord,” Corvallis went on. “Only he would have access to the whole two million.”

“Oh yeah, of course!” Richard said. “I had forgotten about that detail.” For, according to the rules of how the Hiding spells worked, if a vassal Hid something, then not only could the same vassal find and unHide it later; but the same privileges were granted to that vassal’s lord, and the lord’s lord, and so on, all the way up to the Liege Lord of the network. The two million in gold might have been Hidden by hundreds of different vassals within the da G shou’s hierarchy, any one of whom would only be able to see and retrieve the gold that he (or his own vassals) had personally Hidden; but somewhere there must be a Liege Lord who would have the power to personally, single-handedly retrieve all of it.

“Do you know who the Liege Lord is?” Richard asked.

“Of course, in the sense of knowing the account number. But the name and address are fake, as with all of these.”

“Okay,” Richard said, pulling his laptop in closer, adjusting the screen angle for action. “I’m going to get in touch with D-squared. Or rather, his troubadour. And I’m going to make sure he understands that there’s enough gold lying around in the Torgai Foothills to finance the Earthtone Coalition for a year. And I’m going to see whether that gets his creative juices flowing.”

“What about those three thousand K’Shetriae?” asked Corvallis, nervously eyeing a map. “Could your man Egdod summon a meteor storm or a plague or something?”

Richard gave him a look that, to judge from his reaction, must have been pretty damned baleful. “Just to slow them down a little,” C-plus said, holding up his hands.

“ Of course Egdod could summon a meteor storm or a plague,” Richard said, “but I would prefer to avoid deus ex machina stuff, and so as soon as I get done with this email I’ll call a meeting for tomorrow morning.”

“Agenda?”

“Figuring out some less obvious way to fuck up the Bright invasion of the Torgai Foothills.”

The back end of the double-wide was a bunkhouse, divided into half a dozen small rooms each equipped with bunk beds that had been knocked together out of two-by-fours and drywall screws. The beds still had thin foam mattresses. They gave Zula a room of her own, then nailed the door shut behind her and nailed a scrap of plywood over the outside of its window. She spent a long and shivering night under the bare minimum of blankets needed to keep her from perishing outright of hypothermia. When morning came, and they pulled the nails out of her door, she went to the front room, which was warm because of the stove. She curled up on the sofa under as many blankets as she could scavenge and did not move for a long time.

They had destroyed the lock on the filing cabinet and found a lot of papers belonging to the mining company: pay records, receipts, assay reports, hardcopies of spreadsheets. But they also found a survey map of the area, and a road map of British Columbia.

Jones and the most senior-looking of the soldiers, an Afghan named Abdul-Wahaab, took as many of the warm clothes as they could fit on their bodies, bundled themselves up, packed food and water for a couple of days’ journey, and, after a lengthy study of the survey map, trekked off into the woods. Zula, peering out through a gap between blankets, watched them go and thought that she understood their strategy: the snow was less deep in the trees, and it seemed that they were able to move a bit more rapidly there.