“I want to trade information,” Josh managed to choke out.

The Queen of the Fey stared down at him with narrowed eyes. Behind her, Josh could see Babel explode into a cloud of darkness ready to swoop down on her. Babel would have no chance against the Queen. He struggled in alarm, and tried to shout, but only managed a croak. Then the crushing grip around his neck eased and the Queen was suddenly standing several feet away.

Babel hovered uncertainly. Josh was left gasping for breath, but he patted the bed urgently, and Babel descended, resuming his pig form.

The Queen observed this with raised eyebrows.

“The problem with trading information,” she said thoughtfully, “is that one cannot inspect the goods before one makes a payment. Nor can one return the package if one has been sold a pup.”

Josh coughed, remembering to do so as quietly as possible in order not to wake Rachel, while the Queen waited for his fit to pass with mounting impatience. Once he was able to speak, he rasped, “I want to know where Rob the Hedge Knight is.”

The Queen was the only person Josh could think of who might know Rob’s whereabouts, either now or in the future. Rob had been trying to find the Queen so he could challenge one of her followers, Charral, to a fight. Maybe he had done that already, or maybe he was still on her trail.

The Queen raised an eyebrow.

“And I would know this?”

“He was seeking out your court,” Josh said. If Rob had already been and gone, at least Josh would have a fresh trail to follow. If Rob was still trying to find a way to get to Charral, then Josh knew a place that Rob would be in the future, which was even better. He coughed again, and took a sip of water from the glass beside his bed.

The Queen stared thoughtfully over Josh’s head at the opposite wall, her expression utterly blank.

“And what information do you have for me?” she asked

“Er, well. I can't tell you without telling you.”

Her cool, remote expression abruptly dissolved into exasperation.

“Sorry!” Josh said. He tried to think. “It’s to do with what you told me at the ceremony. About there being a great threat loose.”

She continued to stare at him.

“I think you’ll want to know?” he said hopefully.

She raised her eyes to the ceiling, but then gestured to him.

“I agree to the bargain. Tell me what you have.”

“Okay, so at the ceremony you said there was a threat, and that you’d come to warn people, but then you said they seemed to already know. And when I asked about it you directed me to a book about the Demon War. So I assume you wanted to warn people that the demon was back.”

He checked her expression, and saw that she had defaulted to cold and neutral again.

“Go on.”

He cleared his throat.

“Right. So. They don’t know the demon is loose. They think the third key is still at the temple of the Shining Light of the Moon. A few days ago, Sir Doug set off there to protect it.”

She considered this gravely.

“Why did you not tell Sir Doug yourself?”

“I can’t! They’ll ask me how I know!” He hesitated. She seemed to know about the game part of things, and about Earth, so he added, “The person who arrived right before me took the demon class." Did she know what a class was? "They chose to be the demon," he clarified. "I saw the option disappear from the list the Guardian gave me.”

The Queen responded by closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. Then she heaved a sigh, and disposed herself gracefully on the end of the bed, beside Babel. She offered him her fingers to sniff, exactly as if he was a pet. Josh was interested to note that Babel responded to this by smelling them with interest.

“Why don’t you tell me from the beginning?” the Queen asked.

Josh found himself describing his cousin Ben, the hunt for the kidnapper—

“The what?” the Queen interrupted, a tiny frown appearing between her eyebrows. Before Josh could explain, the crease vanished. “Ah!” she said. “You mean abductor.”

“Yes,” Josh said. “I was on my PC, uh … I mean, I was playing the game. You know about the game right?”

“Pee cee?” she asked instead.

“It stands for personal computer,” Josh said. He tried to think how to explain a computer to someone who might not know about electricity.

“I know computers,” the Queen said. She caught his look. “I know many things. I know about the wireless, cars, aeroplanes, suffragettes, the electric, computers, cell phones, and the internet.” Her expression cooled. “I know about the games.”

“Games … as in plural?” Josh straightened with interest. “Rob mentioned a mobile game with pirates. But the game I was playing on my PC—on my computer—was only three years old. So there must have been other games before that, going all the way back to the seventies.” He paused and added, almost to himself, “I wonder what the character screens for the Seven Heroes look like. Did the system here borrow computer game mechanics from Earth, or did Earth borrow them from the Six Spires system? If they originated on Earth, do the Seven Heroes have a character sheet that looks more like something out of a nineteen seventies game? Or has it been updated since? Can the system be patched or changed? Have you ever known that to happen?”

The Queen was giving him that look again. It was a familiar look, one he generally received when he started overanalysing things, or babbling excitedly about a subject for too long.

“I can answer those questions, if you like,” she said. “Instead of trying to find this person you wish to speak to.”

“Uh, no,” Josh said hastily. He saw that the Queen was now giving Babel ear scritches, which Babel appeared to be enjoying. “No, I’d like to know where Rob is, please.”

The Queen smiled.

“I can do better than that.”

“Oh?”

“I can take you to him.”

Josh regarded her warily.

“You would do that?”

“I might,” she said, consideringly.

This seemed too easy. Josh graduated to outright suspicion.

“What would you want in return?”

Her smile widened. Babel was now lying on his back with his little trotters in the air while she rubbed his tummy.

“Oh, nothing much.” She tilted her head to the side. “Have you been to Mayad’s shrine in the city?”

Josh was confused by the sudden change in subject.

“Uh … no?” Was he supposed to have gone? He had prayed to Mayad once, and his prayers had sort of been answered when she put him on the path of the Dreamer. Unless it had been co-incidence. But he’d defaulted naturally back to his normal state of atheism ever since.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The Queen looked amused.

“Go to the shrine of Mayad,” she commanded. “Pay your silver, and cast a token into the water to ask if I should find this Rob. If the token shows its face, then I will facilitate the meeting you desire.”

Josh opened his mouth to ask for more details, but the Queen held her hand up to forestall him. She slid off the end of the bed, to a grumpy protest from Babel, and stalked towards the door, inclining her head as if listening to the other side.

Had Rachel woken up?

Before Josh could tell her not to, she went through the door, closing it behind her. Josh hurried after her, pulling the door open hastily himself, and jumped in shock when he saw a scowling Rachel on the other side, her hand upraised to knock.

Beyond her the hallway was silent and empty, with no sign of the Queen.

“Have you been talking to someone?” Rachel demanded. “I could hear voices.”

“No! I was … er … talking to Babel.”

Rachel craned her neck past him to see Babel sprawled belly up on the bedcovers.

“Ugh, why are you so weird?”

“Just go back to bed,” Josh told her firmly, and closed the door in her face.

The next day he went to find the shrine. This proved not as easy as he had first imagined. The lantern men, who knew everywhere and would light your way for a fee, only worked when it was dark, which meant Josh’s had to fall back on asking various passers-by, none of whom claimed to know anything about it. In the end, a harrassed matron carrying a basket of laundry provided him with directions. By the time he arrived at the shrine, the day was well advanced, and he could feel the scar in his side beginning to ache. Lady Paleyne’s potions had worked phenomenally well, helping him heal in days what would likely have taken weeks, but that didn’t mean he was fully recovered yet. He had found himself too exhausted even to cast spells, which suggested that the healing process used up his own Chi energy.

The shrine itself was a single domed building standing in the centre of a walled courtyard, and the weeds growing between the cracks of the paving slabs suggested it was not well tended. There was a single priestess, who sat on a stool by the entrance, and appeared to have fallen asleep in the early autumn sun.

She snorted awake when Josh’s shadow fell over her, and shaded her hand over her eyes to get a good look at him.

Beyond her was the shrine itself, consisting of a shallow circular pool in the centre of the domed structure, and a statue of the goddess on the opposite wall, currently garlanded with wreaths of plaited straw.

The pool, Josh discovered from the priestess, was one of divination. You pressed your question onto a small clay tablet, and then the priestess threw the tablet into the water. The side it landed on would provide the answer—yes if it landed face up, and no if it landed face down.

“But there’s a fifty percent chance of it turning face up or down,” Josh objected. “How often does it get the answer right?”

The priestess blinked myopically at him. Like Mother Gwyn in the ruins of Aileth-Mair, she was stooped and elderly, with a net of fine smile wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She didn’t seem bothered by Josh’s scepticism.

“If ye don’t have faith the Goddess, lad, then no point in asking in the first place, is there?” she said comfortably.

Josh didn’t like to say that the Queen of the Fairies was making him do this. At least he now understood the instructions he had been given.

“Is it just one question?” he asked.

“One silver per question,” the priestess asked, settling back on her chair and closing her eyes.

“So, if I was willing to pay a thousand silver, I could ask a thousand questions?” Josh persisted.

The priestess opened her eyes and considered this.

“Well, I need to be able to hold all the questions in my hands before I throw them,” she said eventually. “You only get one throw per day.”

That sounded suspiciously like a rule the priestess had made up on the spot just now to avoid having to throw thousands of tablets into the water.

“But,” she added “if I could hold a thousand questions, I don’t see why not. That’s also assuming that the Goddess would decide to answer them,”.

“Wait, the Goddess decides whether to answer? How would I know if the Goddess was busy and didn’t bother, and the answer I got was just random?”

“Everything is connected, lad,” the Priestess declared. “That’s an answer too.”

Josh was not reassured, but the Queen had stipulated that he should do this. She had told him what to ask, but if he could ask more than one question, maybe he should take advantage of that. What other uncertainties coudl he address?

In the end he decided on a list of twelve questions, including four he definitely knew the answers to, which would function as the control questions, and a fifth he was pretty sure of anyway. He limited himself to twelve mainly because that was the amount of silver he had on him, which was probably just as well—he didn’t want to spend a fortune before finding out whether or not it worked.

It was a fantasy world. Of course divination would work, but in fiction the answers were inevitably so vague or cryptic as to be totally useless until after the fact.

Josh spent some time laboriously carving the questions into the little tablets the priestess gave him, using a stylus she had provided for the purpose. He was forced to keep them fairly short and simple. Maybe the tablets were deliberately made this small to prevent people asking long, overly specific and complicated questions. Could he write a question on a bigger tablet and pay more?

In the end, he kept everything as simple as possible. Should I seek out the Dreamer? Is the Dreamer in the invisible tower? Will the dragons know where the invisible tower is? Should I ask Rob the Hedge Knight to help me speak to the dragons? Should I ask the Queen of the Fey to find Rob for me? Will I ever get back to Earth? Can you see events on Earth?

He was fairly sure that 'Does the system have the best interests of the players in mind?' should be a yes. And the remaining questions were the control ones that should certainly be a yes: Was Rachel one of the two people abducted with me? Is Ramona staying at the house of the Marquis of Silbury? Is Babel made from book moths? Can Lady Paleyne do illusion magic?

Once he was finished the priestess slowly clambered to her feet and beckoned to him to follow her into the chamber with his armful of tablets. There she cupped her hands. He tipped the tablets into her palms, not sure whether to set them face up or not at this point, although the priestess said it didn’t matter. In the end he turned half of them face upwards and the rest face down, alternating between the questions he knew the answers to and those he didn’t.

Once the priestess had them all in her hands, she made a curious twisting motion, and flung them into the air.

Josh immediately saw that she had cleverly imparted a spin to each tablet, so that they tumbled head over the heels, and spread out as they splashed down.

The priestess peered carefully into the pool, and gave an interested grunt at the results she saw. She turned and took a slender cane which was propped against the wall, and then used it to point out the ones that had fallen face up. Any that had fallen face down, she obligingly flipped face up with the cane so Josh could see which question it was.

The ones about Rachel, Babel and Lady Paleyne had all fallen face up, which meant yes. The one about Ramona, however, was face down. Did that mean Ramona had left Silbury's house in the last few days, or was there no pattern and the others had just turned face up at random?

The one about the system having everyone’s best interests at heart was quite firmly face down.

The questions about the Dreamer being in the invisible tower, and the dragons knowing the location of the invisible tower, were face up. There were two that had fallen on top of others—despite the priestess throwing them so they would fall apart—leaving them slanted, but still more face up than not. When Josh peered at them, he saw that they were the ones asking whether he should seek out the Dreamer, and whether Rob should help him speak to the dragons.

“Slanted means it won’t do any harm, but it might not help as much as you think,” the priestess explained, rocking her palm back and forth to indicated ambivelance.

The question about Mayad being able to see events on Earth was face down. There was another on that was half lying on top of another tablet, so it was more face down than face up. When the priestess flipped it, Josh saw it was the one asking if he would ever return to Earth.

He felt a pulse of hollow fear at that. He didn't need the priestss to explain that nearly all the way face down meant unlikely to happen.

But unlikely wasn’t the same as impossible.

The last tablet hadn’t even fallen in the pool, but was lying on the edge, face up, and the priestess gave a little snort of amusement when she saw it.

“That means it’s a yes, but She don’t like it,” the priestess explained.

It was the one asking if the Queen should help Josh speak to Rob.

“Thank you,” Josh said to priestess.

She nodded and wandered back to her seat by the door. Josh stared frowning at the pool for a moment longer. Assuming the answers weren’t random, it meant Mayad had reluctantly agreed that he should speak to Rob. However, according to her, it wasn’t as important that he get Rob to speak to the dragons, and the dragons to find the invisible tower, despite the fact that Mayad had confirmed it was the location of the Dreamer. From this—assuming the pattern meant something and wasn't random—Josh deduced that Mayad didn’t think he needed to find the Dreamer.

But that was assuming Mayad was answering with Josh’s own aims in mind. Josh’s overwhelming goal was to return to Earth, and he did need the Dreamer for that. The answers Mayad had given presumably matched her own purpose, not Josh’s, and Josh had no idea what what it was that Mayad really wanted.

She didn’t seem like a bad goddess—she apparently rewarded people for helping old women, small children and animals.

But that didn’t mean she had ultimately good intensions towards Josh.

His heart hardened with resolve.

He would speak to Rob. He would get Rob to speak to the dragons. He would get the dragons to find the invisible tower. He would find the Dreamer. And he would find a way for Rachel and him to return to Earth.

He gave a short, decisive nod at the pool with its fading ripples, then turned and walked out of the shrine … straight into another place entirely.

He was in a courtyard, just like before, but this one was far wilder and more overgrown than Mayad’s shrine. The shrine itself had become a tall tower, somewhat higgledy-piggledy, with a pointy turret and a window at the top—all the better for keeping captured princesses in, Josh assumed. The walls of the courtyard were so overgrown with brambles that he could only see glimpses of the stonework here and there.

The gateway was barred by two wrought metal gates, cast in an ornate, spindly pattern. He realised the metal was silver in colour, rather than the black of iron. Steel? Or was it really silver?

With a shock he realised there was a tall, slender figure standing silently on the gatepost, amidst a nest of brambles. It was unnaturally thin, and had a shock of hair sweeping stiffly up from its head, in a dandelion-like aureole, but since the figure was outlined against a bright sky he could see nothing of its features.

It was so still that, after the first jolt of realisation, he wondered if it was a statue.

Then it moved by tilting its head to regard him curiously.