Neal Stephenson - Reamde

And this left Jones wide open. Ready to be blindsided by the same tactics Zula had used with Sokolov. The difference being that in the case of Sokolov they hadn’t been tactics, just Zula instinctively trusting the man. The question now was: Could she bring about a similar effect in Jones’s mind by doing similar things in a way that was utterly calculated and insincere?

“ONE DAY, MY son, all of this could be yours,” Egdod intoned, swooping low over the Torgai Foothills. He was addressing an Anthron—a man, basically—whom he was holding by the scruff of the neck. The Anthron was dressed in the most nondescript possible woolen cloak. Between his bare feet (for he had declined to spend virtual money on shoes or even sandals), the mature coniferous forest of the Torgai streamed by, just a few hundred meters below.

“Far be it from me to question your database, ” the Anthron replied, “but I still don’t see—”

“There!” Egdod called out, banking into a tight turn and spiraling down toward an outcropping of basalt. “Just at the base of those rocks.”

“I do see a fleck of yellow, but I assumed it was a patch of eälanthassala,” said the Anthron, easily wrapping his tongue around the hexasyllabic name of the sacred flower of the montane branch of the K’Shetriae.

“Look again,” Egdod said, and he shed altitude until they were poised only a few meters above the “fleck.” This was now revealed as a mound of shiny yellow coins. “I’m going to drop you.” He did so.

“Heavens!” exclaimed the Anthron, then landed on his feet and fell awkwardly onto his arse, creating little gold-coin avalanches.

“If your character had better Proprioception—which you could get by spending some of your Attribute credits, or by sending him off to undertake certain types of training, or by drinking the right potion—he would have landed a little more adroitly and rolled out like a paratrooper instead of taking minor damage to his butt, as yours just did,” Egdod said, sounding a little peevish for a creature of nearly godlike status. For this newly created Anthron had been absurdly stingy with his Attribute credits and still had most of them hoarded in reserve where they were doing him absolutely no good.

The burst of gibberish left the Anthron utterly nonplussed.

“Never mind,” Egdod said.

“Who are those creatures coming out of the trees, over yonder?” the Anthron asked, turning his head to the left. Egdod—who was invisible to everyone in T’Rain except for the Anthron—spun in midair to see a pair of Dwinn marauders headed straight for them. One heavily armed and armored cataphract, unslinging a crossbow, and one mage, clad only in robes, but protected by a swirling nebula of colored lights: force field spells that she had thrown up to protect herself from random slings and arrows.

“You could see the answer for yourself if you had spent some of your Attribute credits on Perceptivity,” Egdod groused, and lost altitude until he had positioned himself directly in the path of the incoming crossbow bolt.

“I can’t see!” the Anthron complained.

“Oh yeah—you’re the only person in the world to whom I am opaque,” Egdod said. He turned around to face the Anthron. “Check it out.”

“Oh my word, you’ve been shot!” For Egdod actually did have a crossbow bolt projecting from the general vicinity of his liver. But as the Anthron watched, the bolt was spat out by the wound it had made. It flipped backward for about a meter and stuck in the grass. By the time the Anthron’s eyes had traveled back up to the wound, it had healed, leaving behind a pink scar that was rapidly fading. “A little trick I picked up about a thousand years ago,” Egdod explained. “Hold on a sec while I deal with these guys.”

“Deal with them?”

“I could incinerate them just by looking at them funny,” Egdod said, “but then they’d know that an extremely high-level character was running around the Torgai, and word might get around. So I’m going to do it the way a lower-level character might.” Egdod turned back toward the interlopers, raised his hands, and uttered a phrase in a dead classical language of T’Rain.

Almost. “You used an incorrect declension of turom, ” the Anthron complained.

“It doesn’t seem to have reduced the effectiveness of the spell,” Egdod returned. The meadow between them and the two Dwinn was sprouting a crop of spears. Helmeted heads emerged next, and then the armored bodies of turai, which, in Classical T’Rain mythology, were fast-spawning autochthonous warriors analogous to the spartoi of Greek myth. The Dwinn mage was already waving her hands in the air trying to cast a spell that would throw the turai into confusion and possibly even cause them to attack one another, but there were too many of them and it was too late; the Dwinn had no choice but to retreat into the woods, pursued by the dozen or so turai who had proved resistant to the mage’s spell.

“Okay, let’s get this done,” Egdod said, “because this kind of thing is going to happen over and over again as long as this pile of gold is just sitting here for the taking.”

“Get what done, exactly?” the Anthron asked, standing there knee-deep in specie, clueless to a degree that was somewhere between funny and outrageous.

“Pick up the fucking money and put it in your bag,” Egdod said. “Or just shift-option-right-click on the whole pile.”

“Shift… option… is that some sort of computer terminology?”

“Just hold your horses. I’m coming over there.”

“I thought you were here.”

“In the real world, like.”

RICHARD TOSSED HIS laptop aside onto the mattress and swung his legs down off the edge of the Bed That Queen Anne Had Slept In. Its massive frame of pegged timbers gave out a groan almost as if Queen Anne were still in it now. He rose to his feet and gave his blood pressure a moment to equilibrate, then stalked across the room. Which took a bit of stalking. Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too. D-squared was standing with his back to Richard about three hundred feet away. The place lacked television and central heating, but it did have a massive stand surmounted by a four-inch-thick Bible signed by the Duke of Wellington. D-squared had set up a laptop of his own atop the Good Book and was hunched over it, peering and pecking.

During the short drive in from the FBO at Cranfield, Richard had ordered the driver of his black taxi to swerve to a halt in front of the first computer store. The sales clerk, eager to be of service and to make sure that Richard ended up with a machine he’d be happy with, had been solicitous to a fault until Richard had finally got it through the man’s head that he had way more money than time and could they please get on with it. Five minutes later, Richard had strode out the door of the place and climbed back into the taxi carrying the new laptop (he had left its empty box sitting on the store’s counter and a trail of plastic packaging material all the way to the exit) and a boxed set of DVD-ROMs containing the Legendary Deluxe Platinum Collector’s Edition T’Rain software with Bonus Materials. The computer had finished crawling through its interminable boot-up as they were skirting Bedford, and he had jammed in the installation disc somewhere around St. Neots. The bemused cabbie had dropped him off at the Porter’s Lodge of Trinity when the installation progress bar was creeping along around the 21 percent mark and so Richard had just carried the machine in on his hip and kept it perched there, whirring and clicking and trying to force thunderous T’Rain sound track music through its tinny little speakers, as the bowler-hatted staff had dryly greeted him and escorted him to his cavernous lodgings. It was ten in the morning or something. Richard had found his way to the suite’s toilet, which was located somewhere in Oxfordshire, and showered and shaved, then fed another disc into the computer, napped for a couple of hours, enjoyed a liquid lunch with D-squared, and then brought him back here to teach him the rudiments of T’Rain.