Ben

Ben was sitting in a coffee shop. He realised he was clutching his mug, and deliberately tried to relax his fingers, but they felt distant, as if reluctant to respond to his commands. Opposite was the woman who had tackled him just before he had reached the … pillar of light thing. Whatever it had been.

If it hadn't been for her, he would have walked right into it. Had she saved his life?

“Alright,” the woman said. Her voice was calm and dry, but carefully so, as if she was only hanging onto it by an edge. She had introduced herself as Sylvia. She was apparently a private investigator. Ben assumed she had been trailing him although she hadn’t specifically said so.

She put her phone down on the table between them, angled so they could both see it, and pressed play.

They watched as the footage ran. There was Ben walking along, something he didn’t remember doing. His expression was remote and abstracted, as if fixed on some inner vision. He passed from right to left across the frame, and then the camera re-oriented itself to follow along behind him.

He walked along the street, took a turn into an alley between two houses, and emerged into small patch of wasteland between people’s back gardens, which had a narrow path through it, choked with nettles. In the centre of the path was a tall column of light. The audio from the camera was disrupted by sounds of wind blowing across the microphone, but in the background they could both hear the low hum the pillar emitted. It shifted and rippled slightly, in a way that suggested it was a physical substance.

The view from the camera tilted wildly as Sylvia presumably dropped it so she could tackle Ben. She had done so with a brisk competence that implied experience. Looking at her now, he saw she had the hard, toned physical fitness of someone with a sports or military background.

“What is that?” he asked

Sylvia reran the camera back to the seconds of the clip that contained the pillar.

“You tell me,” she said, still in that same dry tone of voice.

Ben felt an instinctive denial rise up in his throat, but supressed it. He wasn’t going to let himself be put on a defensive back foot, as if this was somehow his fault. Still, it took several moments for him to centre himself enough to speak coherently.

“Three hypotheses,” he said, trying to match the same dry, dispassionate tone Sylvia had used, although with less success. Even he could hear the cracked nervousness in his voice. “One, I faked this. Two, a third party faked it.” He didn’t believe that. He felt he was on the cusp of a momentous discovery, something world-shattering. He forced himself to continue. “Three, it’s a real phenomenon, and it’s responsible for the kidnappings.”

She stared at him levelly, and he held himself still for several excruciating seconds until she suddenly exhaled and leaned back in her chair.

“Alright,” she agreed. “Three possibilities. Why don’t you take me through what happened?”

Ben described his attempts to play the game, the Do You Want to be Immortal? quest, waiting for the kidnapper to contact him, sitting down with a cup of tea, and then nothing until he woke up outside, pinned to the ground with Sylvia’s weight on top of him.

“You have nothing to connect the game quest with your sleep-walking episode,” she said sceptically, when he had finished.

“Josh got the same quest before he disappeared.”

Her lips twisted into a dubious expression.

“Josh is still a suspect," she pointed out. "Missing twenty-year old man. Records of him engaging in chat and calls outside the game with not one, but two minors prior to his disappearance. Missing teenage girl. It’s not hard to connect the dots.”

Ben felt the familiar anger ignite deep in his chest, but forced himself to be calm. It was the same line the police had taken. And if you looked at it from the outside, it made a horrible kind of sense. Except it was a red herring, and every time the police concentrated on that was time wasted that could have been spent finding the true perpetrator.

“And you think Josh created the pillar thing too?” he asked, unable to keep a bite of sarcasm out of his voice.

“You could have done so, as his collaborator.”

“You overestimate my technical skills,” he said shortly. “I wouldn’t have the first clue how to make a glowing column of plasma that apparently stays up by itself.” He stopped and gathered himself. “Let's assume it’s either a real phenomenon, or faked by a third party. There are two lines of inquiry. One, the game company, because of the quest. Both Josh and I got the immortality quest right before … something weird happened to us. That can’t be coincidence. And two, the pillar itself.”

“The police are already all over the game company. Are you suggesting I show them the footage of the pillar too?”

Ben paused.

“There isn’t enough for them to go on,” he said reluctantly. “The police hotline will be getting hundreds of crank calls on a daily basis.” He didn’t add that his own credibility with the police was at an all-time low. “The footage you took … they’ll think the same thing you did. It’s too incredible to be real.”

She met his eyes and then looked away. She had seen. She had to know it wasn’t fake. It was something. Aliens, maybe. There was a yawning abyss in front of them, and they were both trying not to fall into it.

“We need to find more.”

“We?” she questioned.

“You were hired, weren’t you? Was it to follow me?”

“I can’t disclose that,” she said automatically.

“Well, why don’t you follow me around while I investigate?”

She didn’t commit herself either way.

“Where are you planning to start?”

Ben smiled, and leaned forward.

“Here’s what I’m going to do …” he said.

Josh

All Josh’s nervous fretting had made him tired. He had closed his eyes for a moment, and when he woke up, the angle of the sun through the window meant he must have dozed off for at least an hour or two. Rachel was gone.

“Rachel?” he called. There was no answer. Was she in her own room? She must be tired after all the stress of the night before. She probably hadn’t slept much.

He should get up and start preparing to move them to a different inn, but he had never felt less like moving. He peeled back the covers and slowly levered himself out of bed. It hurt, a lot, and he felt stabbing pains in his side. By the time he was upright he was already feeling faint. He swayed in place until the greyness receded a bit and took a few exploratory steps forward.

He had to perch on the end of the bed to rest before he could muster up enough energy to make it to the sitting room. Rachel wasn’t there either. He called her name, but there was no reply. When he tapped on her door, and then opened it, he found her room empty, and her bed unslept in.

By that point he began to worry, but he was also still feeling shaky. There was sofa in the sitting room, so he lowered himself carefully into it. He spent the next couple of hours imaging all the things that could have happened to Rachel. She must have gone out, but what was she doing? Trying to find them a new place to stay?

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When she finally did arrive, she was wearing her peasant outfit, and she had a scruffy looking kid in tow whom Josh identified, with some surprise, as Lalf the stable boy, last seen clinging to Lady Paleyne’s skirts after Josh had first arrived in Dendral.

“This is Lalf,” Rachel announced.

Josh looked him over. He was wearing shorts which displayed his scabby knees. One sock had descended into wrinkles around his ankle, his shirt was missing a button, he had a smudge of dirt on his nose, and his hair was sticking up in different directions.

“We’ve met,” Josh said. Lalf gave an unimpressed sniff in return.

Rachel, meanwhile, bounded over to Josh’s side.

“You’re supposed to be in bed!” she scolded.

By this point, Josh was regretting ever having left it, so he didn’t argue when both children hauled him up and pushed him back towards the bedroom.

“How did you meet Lalf?” He asked, once he was ensconced beneath the covers again.

“Asked around until I found out where your Lady P was staying,” Rachel explained. “Started asking questions in the stable, and Lalf was there.”

They seemed to have made fast friends in the intervening hours. Lalf was hanging on Rachel’s every word. How had that happened?

“We have an idea,” Rachel announced. “Me and Lalf thought it up. It’s a really good idea, isn’t it, Lalf?”

Lalf nodded vigorously.

“And what is that?” Josh asked warily.

Rachel bounced up and down on her heels.

“You’re going to die!”

“I’m going to what?”

“Yeah,” Rachel said exuberantly. “Don’t worry. We arranged it already with Lady P.”

That evening, Rachel repeatedly went to ask the innkeeper for bandages and hot water, adopting an increasingly grave expression each time. Eventually she sent a message via a scrubby, unkempt page boy, who just happened to turn up at the appropriate moment. The message summoned a stately matron dressed in a nun’s wimple, accompanied two serious and subdued attendants.

“What have you done to yourself now?” the nun asked, in Lady Paleyne’s voice. She dropped the illusion at the same time as she dropped the starched manners, and plumped herself down in the chair by Joshua’s bed. “You did something risky and stupid,” she guessed.

Josh was relieved that Rachel, once she has been introduced to Lady Paleyne by Lalf, had been discreet enough not to repeat their nighttime adventure in the cathedral, but had merely said that Josh had been attacked and was laying low.

“I tried to stop someone else doing something risky and stupid,” Josh said firmly, before this could turn into one of those ‘men are stupid’ conversations.

Lady Paleyne raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Did you have a run in with Orlad?”

Josh wished he could say yes, because then it would be something Lady Paleyne might feel responsible for.

“No,” he said shortly.

“Who is after you, then, that you are so afraid of?”

Josh scowled and glanced at sitting room door, where the two attendants—he presumed they were Lady Paleyne’s servants—were waiting for their part in the playacting that was shortly to follow.

“Don’t worry about them,” she said, following his gaze. “They’re loyal.”

“You thought the same about Jann.”

Jann had been Lady Paleyne’s manservant, the one who had betrayed her in the Azure Cathedral. Her lips compressed at the reminder, and her eyes glittered.

“I trusted Jann because he came into my service after I healed his wife when she was sick,” she said shortly. “Unbeknownst to me, not only did she leave him soon after, he was then saddled with her debts, and the fool didn’t think to ask me for help.” She added acidly. “Male pride, no doubt. But it was child’s play for a rival agent to acquire his outstanding debts and thus compromise him.”

Josh didn’t like the idea of being indebted to Lady Paleyne himself, but decided not to voice that opinion.

“You haven’t told me who it is I’m helping you hide from,” she continued.

Josh hesitated, wondering what to say, and was extremely grateful when Lalf came trotting into the bedroom just then.

“He’s still alive,” Lalf said in disappointment, looking Josh over critically.

“I’m not going to waste my magic making him look dead before he needs to be seen that way,” Lady Paleyne pointed out.

“I’m only going to be fake dead, not really dead,” Josh said, at the same time.

“After my great aunt died,” Lalf announced, “My cousin May sat with the body overnight, and then she started screaming and woke everyone up, and it turned out,” he said with relish, “that my great aunt did a great big fart after she was dead.”

“Will you stop talking, you wretched child!” Lady Paleyne exclaimed.

“I don’t think we need to go that far for the sake of verisimilitude,” Josh added.

“What’s verisi … versmil … versmil …?”

“Making things seem realistic.” Josh hunted around for another topic of conversation. “Let’s talk about the Seven Heroes,” he said quickly.

To his relief, Lalf took the bait, and prattled happily on this subject for some time. Lady Paleyne, Josh was interested to see, didn’t reiterate her command to Lalf that he should stop talking. Given that Lalf was her servant, she might have done so quite easily, or sent him out of the room when he got annoying. Instead, she let him babble.

Once Lalf had finished with heroes, he moved onto the only subject which could rival heroes in his estimation—dragons. There were six dragons in Six Spires, one for each of the spires themselves, and not only could Lalf name them all, but he could recite their territory, their colour, their disposition, and their powers. There were only ever six true dragons in the world, one for each spire—celestial, ice, fire, rock, verdant, and sea. Every so often, a dragon would lay a clutch of eggs, but the offspring that hatched would become either wyverns or wyrms. Once every few hundred years, one of the true dragons would die, and a wyvern would spontaneously metamorphose into a dragon to take its place. Josh was familiar with the nature of the six dragons from Spiralia Online, but he listened closely to Lalf nevertheless. If he’d been born and raised in Six Spires, he had no doubt he would have been just as fascinated by dragons at Lalf’s age.

It was in the early hours of the morning when Josh finally lay down on the stretcher that the attendants had prepared, and Lady Paleyne cast an illusion on him to make him look like a corpse.

“You have to look more upset,” Lady Paleyne told Rachel, who was busy staring at Josh with ghoulish fascination. “You’re a young girl. Surely tears and an overly dramatic sensibility should come naturally.”

Rachel disregarded this.

“You look like a zombie!”

“I’m dead, remember?” Josh told her. “You should feel at least a little bit sad.”

Rachel made exaggerated sad puppy dog eyes. Josh sighed, and let his head fall back. He concentrated on staring at the ceiling. Lady Paleyne’s illusion would make it look like he wasn’t moving or blinking.

She cast the illusion of the middle-aged nun on her face again, while the two attendants hoisted the stretcher, and the little procession filtered out. Rachel even managed a realistic sobbing sound along the way.

There, Lady Paleyne had a carriage waiting. Josh was loaded into it, the window blinds were pulled down, and Josh could stop pretending to be a corpse.

“This ruse won’t stand up to scrutiny,” Lady Paleyne warned him. “Whoever is looking for you—I note you are still avoiding telling me who it is—will inevitably check the nunneries and realise that no nun was dispatched to a death bed this night. But we can make sure the trail goes cold.”

The house she took them to was a narrow tenement building close to the docks, one of the many owned by her father. This one, she said, just happened to be available to rent. It was a smaller and shabbier than the lodging house Josh had been staying in until now, but it would do.

Babel materialised as soon as Lady Paleyne and her entourage left, although they could still hear Lalf’s piping little voice upraised as he explained something to his mistress. Finally the front door closed, leaving Josh and Rachel alone in the house.

“She is totally into you,” Rachel said. “Why didn’t you let her heal you?”

“One, running illusions takes a lot out of her, and two…” Josh paused. “I was nervous she would find my player core. It’s a physical thing." He patted his chest. "What if she could detect it?”

Rachel looked sceptical.

“She hasn’t so far.”

“Yes, but she’s never really looked that hard. I don’t want to risk it.”

The next few days were an exercise in frustration for Josh. He had to sit at home and heal, so he spent his time working on his crafting skills, and preparing for his masterwork. Rachel, however, went out every day, despite Josh’s protestations that she should keep a low profile. She borrowed money from him to buy a better quality dress than her peasant garb, and a pair of pince nez, which were little glasses that sat on her nose and made her look studious. Her plan was to go around the city with a notepad and pencil, pretending that she was a student doing a project on the Seven Heroes, and interviewing people.

“Do they even have schools here?” Josh asked. “Maybe you should check that first!”

She gave him a look, but returned later that day to confirm that yes, they did indeed have schools here, and her disguise had been phenomenally successful. Josh thought sourly about his own experience with librarians, but kept his mouth shut while she recounted the things she found out.

Most of it was information he already knew, or rumour and speculation that might or might not be true. On the third day, she came back announcing that she had found an elderly grandma who had worked at the palace of Celespire as a chambermaid, and knew all the gossip.

The former chambermaid had even known Karl, describing him as a sulky, resentful little boy, and full of self-importance once he was apprenticed to a wizard.

Josh perked his ears up.

“Which wizard?” he asked.

Rachel consulted her notes.

“Wizard Hawthorne.”

Josh tried to place the name.

“The guy with the invisible tower,” he said, as it finally clicked. “The invisible floating tower that … disappeared …”

Rachel frowned at him as he stared off into space.

“What?”

“Oh hell,” Josh said. “I know where the Dreamer must be hiding. And why no-one has been able to find him.”

On the fourth day, Josh decided he was healed enough to leave the house. He was still stiff and painful, but Lady Paleyne had been sending over a daily vial of medicine imbued with magic—actual healing potions! They did help to speed up the recovery process, and he felt able to walk around normally.

“Where are you going?” Rachel demanded, when she came in and saw him dressed up to go out.

Josh settled his Robin Hood hat on his head.

“Got to see a guy about a dragon,” he said.