Trio of Sorcery (25 page)

Control. That was always her big stumbling block. She'd always hated to give up control of anything. And yet…in order to grow, she had to. That had been made clear in the past, and it was just as clear now.

So David wasn't here, only Grandfather, laying out the boundaries of a sacred dancing ground. She would trust in David, in Grandfather, in Grandmother Spider.

And in her own good reasoning.

“Time to go,” she said firmly, picking up the boom box, which held a very different tape than it had before. She would play it on endless repeat, because she had no idea how long this was going to take. Just in case David didn't manage his own magic and bring that mysterious help.

When she and Caroline got to the dancing ground, it
was almost dark. Grandfather had already set up the four arbors in the four corners and finished smudging the area; the fire was burning in the east and David was nowhere in sight. She gave Grandfather a questioning look and he shrugged. She sighed and put down the boom box. Looked like it was a good thing she'd brought it.

Then she heard a little rustle of leaves, the cracking of a single twig, and David and two more men stepped out through the brush.

Both of the strangers were Indian, though she couldn't have said what tribe. The one carrying a beautifully made drum had a craggy, good-natured face, a veritable bush of hair, and an expression of amusement in his eyes. The other had a sharp face and extremely bright eyes that seemed to see everything. Both were wearing ordinary jeans, plaid shirts, and battered black felt hats. The second had a feather in his hatband.

“We hear you need musicians,” said the drummer with the flash of a grin and his yellow eyes.

She forcibly kept herself from staring as the other man—obviously the singer—nodded. Yellow eyes? But—

“Your friend asked us for help, and your Grandmother sent us,” the drummer added, with a wink.

My Grandmother…
Jennie realized that he meant Grand mother Spider.

“A special dance needs special musicians, Honored Ones,” she replied, suspecting that the drummer was Coyote and the singer, some other spirit.

The feather in the second stranger's hat might be a clue. Mockingbird, maybe. He'd be a logical choice. A lot of good Medicine, but not so much that he'd frighten away the ghost. Coyote was the supreme Trickster and could probably hide his identity from just about anything, so it was unlikely the ghost would take alarm from him.

“Oh, we are not that special,” the drummer replied as they set up to play. “But we know some clever tricks.”

Well, that pretty much cemented it.

Jennie looked at Caroline, who seemed bewildered. “Ready?”

Caroline nodded, then went to stand next to the singer. Jennie, Caroline, and the singer faced east. She yelled four times; the singer, the drummer, Jennie, Grandfather, and David answered her. The singer began the song, the drummer followed him, and all six of them joined hands, alternating male and female as much as possible, as he led them in the four directions of the circle. When they had completed the circle, Jennie, David, and Grandfather fell back, and the singer and Caroline began a stomp dance.

The boundaries of the dancing ground began to haze.

It was something like a fog—but it rose up out of the earth, blurring the trees and brush on the other side of that invisible boundary. The light changed too; instead of coming from the fire alone, some light came from that strange fog.

Jennie shivered as she realized that they weren't in the waking world anymore.

This was what having Coyote and Mockingbird as the drum circle meant. The dancing ground was in the middle place, halfway between the spirit world and the waking world. Medicine People and
mi-ah-lushka
would square off with only the power—and the wits—they brought with them.

As Caroline and the singer danced, a shadow formed in the north, a shadow that took on form and substance until the
mi-ah-lushka
stood there. Before he could move, Jennie danced out to Caroline, and in a move that had never been in any traditional dance that she had ever seen, she circled Caroline and the singer, then cut between them. The singer retired to the side of the circle, still singing, while she and Caroline danced.

Jennie flipped her shawl off her shoulders and held it by two corners in front of her. She flipped one of the corners to Caroline, who caught it. They continued to dance with the shawl held between them, then Jennie danced around in back of Caroline, draping the shawl over her shoulders. Then Jennie let go and danced back to the sidelines, while Caroline danced alone.

If Jennie had done her job right, Caroline now looked exactly like that long-lost Chickasaw woman to the
mi-ah lushka.

When she looked over at the spirit, she knew the trick had worked. The
mi-ah-lushka
stared at Caroline as if mesmerized; then, moving to the drumbeat, he came onto the dancing ground.

Now…now she had him. He was in the trap.

They danced together, the spirit staring down at Caroline with a terrible possessiveness, while the singer chanted and the drum held steady, the bright eyes of Coyote glaring with a wild glee from under the rim of his hat. But Caroline wasn't enthralled, not this time. The Medicine in Jennie's shawl was keeping her safe from the spirit's power. As long as she wore it, he wouldn't be able to control her and he wouldn't be able to drain her either.

Right now, it didn't look as if he noticed or cared. This was the object he had obsessed over for centuries. He had this woman right where he wanted her.

Or so he thought.

Jennie nodded to David and they moved out onto the dancing ground, joining the other two. Side by side, the two couples moved to the same rhythm, until the beat began to speed up and the words changed. Caroline pulled the shawl from her shoulders and held it out as Jennie had before. Puzzlement crept into the spirit's gaze, but they gave him no time to think.

Caroline flipped one corner of the shawl to Jennie as the beat sped up more.

The singer yelled.

At the same moment, Jennie spun, pulling the shawl over her own shoulders and stepping between the
mi-ah lushka
and Caroline. As she momentarily blocked the spirit's view, David darted toward Caroline, grabbed her hand, and pulled her off to one side.

Now it was Jennie who was the focus of the spirit's fierce attention. The singer's voice took on a wild intensity and the drumbeat increased until it was the same pace as a shawl-dance.

Jennie gave up all pretense of performing a traditional Chickasaw dance. Instead she hopped and pranced, kicked and spun, in a shawl-dance worthy of a competition. The point was to get every bit of the spirit's attention on
her
and keep it there. The fire leapt higher, casting flickering light over both of them as she circled around and around him, sunwise, binding him up in the magic she was dancing. He'd likely never seen anything like this before. With any luck, he never would again.

Now if Grandfather just managed his part—

She couldn't think about that right now. Right now she had to dance right
on
the song, every step exactly in time with the drumbeat. As she spun, the fringe of her shawl flung straight out, she caught Coyote's eyes. He was grinning like a mad thing, his yellow eyes blazing.

One song led straight into the next, like a competition; there was no time to breathe, no time to think. She had to keep the
mi-ah-lushka
here. Had to make him see nothing but her. Had to make him forget about power and fighting and anything except what he
thought
he saw in front of him.

And then, as the song came around for the third time, and she spun a little away from him, she saw it—

Saw
her
.

The slight, sad spirit of the Osage woman who had been left behind, with Grandfather at her side.

Use that silver tongue, Little Old Man—

Jennie spun away again, keeping the spirit facing away from the woman. She didn't want him to see her just yet.

With little trotting steps, the singer and the drummer moved over to Grandfather and the woman-ghost. As Grandfather continued to speak in her ear, the singer's voice took on an edge of mockery.

She knew what goad Grandfather was using on the woman.
Are you a woman or a timid mouse? Are you a sparrow? Do you let your man be witched away from you like this? Stand up for yourself! Are you just going to give up like you did before? Too bad, this time you can't die! If you want him—take him back!

Jennie watched with hidden glee as the woman's posture changed, her back straightened, and her mouth took on a stubborn set. Her eyes flashed, and she became more solid, more real, until at last she looked ready to fight.

That was when David—though it was
supposed
to have been Grandfather!—took her hand and danced her into the circle. Jennie spun, keeping the
mi-ah-lushka
mesmerized, then flipped her shawl over her shoulders and held it out before her again.

With a deft half turn, she faced the woman-ghost and flipped the corner of the shawl to her.

This was where it could all fall apart. Though she made no sound, in her mind, Jennie was screaming as she threw the bit of cloth.
Take it! Take it!

There was a flash of surprise in the woman-ghost's eyes, but her hand snaked out and she seized the corner of the shawl.

Now the two of them danced with the shawl held between them. The
mi-ah-lushka
danced, looking bewildered, as his gaze went from Jennie to the woman and back again. The drumbeats slowed. Jennie made the transition back to a more traditional dance, though there was no traditional dance that featured two women, a shawl, and a bemused man, a dance where the women took turns curling into the shawl's embrace and out of it again, where they wrapped the man for a moment in the shawl's wings and then let him go.

The magic worked on him, dazzling him, until at last, Jennie spun the woman-ghost into the shawl for the last time and released the corner. David took Jennie's hand, leaving the two ghosts dancing slowly, deliberately, in the center of the circle. The
mi-ah-lushka
's eyes never left the ghost-woman's. What he saw there, Jennie couldn't begin to guess. What the woman thought, though, was plain as plain. In her eyes was the same heat, the same adoration, that Jennie had seen in Grandmother Spider's vision. Jennie recognized the song; it was a Cherokee love song. Mockingbird added his own sort of magic to the mix, drawing the two together.

Finally, as the drum slowed to the pace of a steady heartbeat, the singer ended his song, though the drum continued. Slowly, the woman reached out and took the
mi-ah-lushka
's hand. Slowly, she danced backwards, away from the fire, into the west, drawing him after her. He followed, obedient as a dog. They passed under the arbor, into the shadows.

And then they were gone.

The drummer ended the song. At the edges of the circle, the fog lifted and the waking world returned. Jennie felt her knees go weak and was very, very glad that David was there to steady her.

The drummer and singer crossed the circle and the drummer tipped his hat to her.

“That was some performance, Elder Brothers,” Jennie said, still trying to catch her breath.

“We might say the same, Little Sister,” Coyote retorted, grinning. Mockingbird nodded.

“I might make a song on it one day,” Mockingbird added, the first time he'd opened his mouth except to sing.

“I believe you dropped your tobacco pouches, cousins,” Grandfather called out, tossing a pair of fat leather pouches at the two, who deftly caught them out of the air. Coyote's eyes twinkled.

“I believe you are right, cousin,” he replied with another tip of his hat. “Now, my friend and I should be on our way. But call on us again, if you reckon to stir up a bit of fun like this.”

Grandfather laughed. Behind him, Nathan Begay finally stepped into the circle and Caroline practically glued herself to him.

“I think it's safe to leave these two now,” Grandfather said, sounding a good deal more chipper than he had any right to, seeing how much Medicine he must have poured out to summon the spirit of the
mi-ah-lushka
's lover from the Other Country.

“I want a gallon of lemonade, a steak, and another gallon of lemonade, in that order,” Jennie said faintly. “Little Old Man, I will even share it with you. But you”—she turned to look at David—“you get whatever you want, up to and including half a buffalo. How did you
do
that?”

“Only half?” He laughed. “How, well…partly let's say I'm a good student, partly let's say it's my charm and devastating wit. There's only one thing I feel bad about.”

Jennie blinked. “What's there to feel bad about? We solved this without anyone getting hurt!”

“But you lost your shawl.” David grimaced a little. “That was your competition shawl.”

“I can get another,” she replied. “When you think what the alternative could have been—”

David glanced back at Begay and Caroline, outlined by the firelight. “Hmm. Good answer.” He put his arm around her. “Let's go get that lemonade.”

“You're buying!” yelled Grandfather, already three yards ahead of them on the trail.

Welcome back to the present day, and a different sort of sorcery where magic and cyberspace intersect. Thanks to War Witch and Dark Watcher, devs at NCsoft/Paragon Studios, for vetting this for me!

Tom Bishop stared morosely at the sea of code on his computer screen. Every gamer thought that achieving the life of a dev—a game developer—was the Holy Grail. And yeah, you had to love games to work on them, because if you didn't you'd probably throw yourself out a window in the first three months. Mostly, being a game programmer meant a lot of long hours, a lot of cold pizza dinners, and if you were married, you needed a really, really understanding spouse. Girlfriends tended to leave after the first run-up to a release. Boyfriends—well, he wasn't sure about that. Gamer Grrlz tended to have gamer boyfriends, or at least, ones that were in software themselves and knew what schedules looked like. But Murphy's Law being what it was, probably the gals had almost as many problems in their love lives as the guys did.

Now, this wasn't prerelease, it was post. And under
normal circumstances, he wouldn't even have been here. Most of the floor was dark, cubicles lit only by the glow of screen savers. You could shoot a cannon through the office and not kill anyone; that was how it was this late at night, and doubly so right after an issue update once the catastrophic bugs and the hot patches to fix them were in. That the issue had gone live just before Christmas was an added bonus for the staff; it meant that, for a change, some of them would be free to travel to visit family over the holiday. The air held that curiously sterile smell of new offices, faintly scented by someone's fruity air freshener in some nearby cube. The only sounds came from some of those screen savers, and, now and then, his own typing.

Not that he was typing in the window that held the code he was trying to debug. No, he was answering IMs from friends who weren't stuck trying to figure out why Dark Valley was a whole lot darker than it should have been—and why PCs—player characters—were faceplanting a lot more than they should have been in there. Ah, the glamorous life of a dev. Tom chugged back a slug of Mountain Dew and kept staring and typing. Overhead, festive Christmas decorations moved in the currents of air from the vents they were strung on.

Tom worked on Many Worlds Online, one of the most popular multiplayer online games on the planet, and most of the time it was fun. He loved coding. He actually enjoyed debugging; he had the kind of patient aptitude for
sleuthing that was perfectly suited to debugging. And while the life was far from glamorous, how many people actually got to make a living at something they loved these days? Oh, there were drawbacks. The long hours were a lot more wearing than they had been when he'd been in college. Sometimes the bugs drove him up a wall. And now and then he got a little tired of the players posting on the forums whining and bitching, but of course, there was a solution to that—he could choose not to read the forums. Mostly that was what he did—ignored the forums and the moaning and Drama Llamas, except when someone e-mailed or IMed him with something particularly funny.

But otherwise, this was a dream job. He loved games. He lived games. He loved and lived code. Not even forum trolls could spoil that for him.

Tom was a Gaming Geek and proud of it. He even had a Gamer Grrrl girlfriend who “got” being a code head. She had her own thing, first-person shooters, and her own real job, also coding, but for Web pages. There was nothing serious between them yet but…there was potential. So far neither of them had discovered anything about the other one that would drive a stake into the heart of the budding relationship. And now he was old and wise enough to look at the word “relationship” and not run away, to look forward to the possibility, in fact.

Most days, most weeks, he was happy to come to work, happy to stay late, happy to delve into the bits and bytes and figure just what had gone wrong where. It was something
he was good at. He had a logical mind, and he had always been a puzzle solver, and a darned good one.

Except now. Why were so many characters dying so often in Dark Valley? Granted, Dark Valley was a whole new horror-themed zone, just implemented amid much fanfare and hoopla, and until they got the hang of the new quirks, mobs, and architecture, even experienced players planted a lot when a new zone was opened. There were always complaints, accusations that powers had been nerfed, that the mobs were tuned too high. Usually that stuff got worked out in beta test. But this time—there were complaints from some of the really experienced players who had been in beta and knew what to expect, and there were a lot of them. Way more than usual.

He stared at the AI code, and it still didn't make any sense to him. It was the same as in every zone. Enemies here shouldn't be defeating player characters at three times the rate they did in the other zones.

His message window chimed, and he checked it.
Still there?
asked jquest77. This was a player he'd gotten to know in beta test on the zone; levelheaded, not a troll, not a fanboy, an adult with a wife and two kids. Jquest77 never pestered him, but was more than happy to put together a fun team of friends for Tom when he got out on his personal avatars. He'd never asked Tom to do anything “special” for him, so Tom had added the guy to his IM list. Then again, jquest77's day job was also as a code head, so there was the sympathy and camaraderie of fellow coders at
work. Another plus was that jquest77 typed in real words and full sentences, not l33t txtsp34k.

Yeah. The AI is fine, I've checked the tables so many times I could see them in my sleep, I even went in the test server and it runs normally in there. It's only a problem on the live servers.

He went back to checking the difficulty tweaking. Could he have mistaken a decimal point somewhere?

Not that he hadn't already checked this twenty times since this morning.
Hell, maybe I'm hoping that as I look at the numbers some illusion will suddenly wear off and I'll be looking at the
real
numbers.

The main mob enemies in this zone were zombies, werewolves, and ghosts. The solo enemies were vampires. There was a Boss Monster that spawned randomly, something he had been told was a fairly accurate interpretation of the Native American Wendigo. They all ran the same basic AI, with tweaks for different powers. They all used the same tables.

Except in Dark Valley, everything was spawning weirdly. Mobs were spawning in greater numbers or at higher levels than they should. Solos weren't just spawning, they were sneaking up on the player characters and ambushing them. Ambushing them! Spawning right behind them—from the player point of view, out of nowhere! Which would have been fine, and hell, they could advertise that as a new feature (“It's not a bug, it's a feature!”), if the monsters weren't also spawning three or four levels higher
than they were supposed to, which made it pretty hard on the poor players, who were faced with an enemy that could drop them in one shot. And the Wendigo was spawning at places it definitely shouldn't, like in the safe zones around the Trading Outposts and the Passage Gates that allowed player characters to move from one zone to another.

It was almost as if this zone was
trying
to kill the players. And that made no sense.

His IM pinged again.
Have you considered that there might be something in there that you never coded?

His mouth went dry. A hack? That was a game writer's worst nightmare—that a hack would get in there and—

But that was also the parent company's worst nightmare, and the amount of ice and firewall they had on their servers was phenomenal…

Another coder here at the office? A patch? But that would show up in the code he was staring at, because he was looking at the raw code, the real stuff, and not the hard copy program copies of what was “supposed” to be there.
I don't know how a hacker would have gotten in there,
he replied.
And besides, it's on all the servers but Test. Dude, that is a lot of servers.

Not a hack,
came the reply.
And not a patch. Something else. Something that crawled in between the lines of code.

Now, any other time, that would probably have made him laugh his ass off. It was like a line from a bad horror
movie. But it was 3:00
A.M
. and the offices were dark, except for the lights in his cube and the weird glows and weirder sound effects from dozens of disparate machines…

So that message made the hair on the back of Tom's neck stand straight up.

He shook it off and checked on the bug petitions and calls for help. Maybe he'd catch a pattern. As usual, even at this hour, there were plenty of them from Dark Valley; the one that caught his eye was that the Wendigo had spawned near the Passage Gate again on the Azure server. It occurred to him then that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a look at this firsthand while he despawned the thing. He logged himself as accepting the petition and signed in as his god-mode avatar. He watched as the loading bar crept to the right, heard the zone in cue, and prepared to deal with the—

There was just enough time for the screen to register the safe zone at the Passage Gate, and the presence of the Wendigo inside the safe zone, when the screen filled with light and red numbers, the words “Critical Hit,” and—

Tom stared at his prone avatar in shock. “He critted me? He
critted
me?” he said out loud, aghast, his brain simply not accepting the fact. It shouldn't be possible. The avatar was in god-mode, with every power in the book and impossible to hit. The Wendigo, awesome as it was and tough as it was, should not have been able to lodge a pinprick's worth of damage, much less faceplant him.

For a long moment he stared at his avatar in utter disbelief; then the Wendigo uttered its trademark raspy laugh and he tore his eyes away from his avatar.

As the latest of the Boss Monsters, the Wendigo was the showpiece of the zone. With a little bit of H. P. Lovecraft and a lot of Native American myth, the devs and design team had, at least according to the reviewers, out-done themselves. Take a fifty-foot-tall man. Starve him to emaciation and dehydrate him until his desiccated skin pulls tight over his bones. Give him the ashen pallor of death and push his eyes back into their sockets, then light them with a feral red glow. Cover him with sores, and give him lips that were tattered and bloody.

The final touch was an endless appetite. That was the Wendigo. The mythic original, the Ojibwa legend, probably came out of some dreadful true story of a tribesman who had been forced to resort to cannibalism and had gone mad rather than face what he had done. According to the myth, some vile magic granted the Wendigo increasing power with every new victim, so that it grew larger and stronger with every human it ate.

In game terms, the Wendigo did something entirely new to MWO. Instead of simply reducing a player character's health and hit points by smacking him around with its war club until the players either defeated it or it defeated them, the Wendigo absorbed their health points, strengthening itself, healing itself, and growing a little bigger with every player character's defeat. That gave it
the game analogy to the cannibalism of the myth. Of course, the mythic version would just keep getting bigger, while the game version was limited by the size tables, but it was still an innovation that the reviewers liked.

That was what it did according to the code.

The code didn't give it the ability to take sadistic pleasure in what it did.

The ugly thing laughed again.

Then it
looked right at him.

Tom found himself frozen in his chair. The Wendigo was looking right at him. Not the avatar facedown on the “ground” in front of it.
Him
. The guy on the other side of the computer screen. The malevolent glare at the back of those almost-empty eye sockets was directed at
him.

As if it knew he was there. He stared into that red gaze, mesmerized by it. It didn't matter that he knew it was nothing more than a bunch of pixels, designed by Erik in the cubicle across from his, rendered by the server as directed by the platform code. None of that mattered. Because what that smoldering crimson glow said to his gut was this—

Bring it on, code monkey. You can despawn me now, but wait. One of these days, you won't be able to. Then I will reach through that screen, and I will be coming for you. Personally.

He broke the thing's hold on his mind with a smothered gasp, revived his avatar, and despawned the damned thing. It laughed at him as it died.

He was shaking so hard that it took him a moment to
realize that his avatar wasn't alone in the zone. Jquest77's favorite character, an Amazonian warrior named Hippolyta, had spawned in time to see the Wendigo vanish. Hippolyta was why he'd singled out jquest77 in the first place in test when he put together a team to try out some of the new quests. Unlike most of the females-played-by-males, she was a fairly accurate rendition of a Grecian Amazon. She was fully and modestly clothed, and her cups weren't runnething over. The mere look of the avatar had told him that the player behind her was a sensible guy, which was borne out by his initial interactions with character
and
player.

“Something is seriously wrong here.” That jquest77 was as disturbed by what he had seen as Tom was showed in the fact that the player had fallen out of character. Jquest was a role-player, and even at the most stressed of times, Hippolyta would have been speaking forsoothly. “I thought you couldn't get planted in god-mode.”

“Looks like the Wendigo thought different.” He wasn't usually this abrupt with a friend but—dammit, he felt shaken to his toes. “Gotta log.” He hit the
Exit
button, exiting straight to the desktop.

Jquest77 wants to share a file,
said his IM program. He hesitated a moment, then hit
Okay.

The file was a tiny jpeg. No harm in opening it.

It was a business card.

Ellen McBride, techno-shaman,
it said, with an address,
e-mail, Web site, and a phone number. The IM program pinged again.