“Why the hell should he!? With a few text messages he could be an Emperor!”
“If he knew how to send text messages, yes.”
“How many vassals does he have? Are they powerful?”
“I haven’t checked since the FBO at Cranfield.”
“The huh?”
“In about ten hours. So I have no idea.”
“Why would he suddenly start? Why now?”
“Between you and me—and really, Devin, this must never leave this trailer—” Richard leaned in, held up his hands, rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.
“How could he possibly be in need of money?”
“Have you ever paid taxes in the U. K.? Tried to fix up a sandstone castle on the Isle of Man? Not to mention his other properties.” Richard just made the last part up.
“What other properties?”
“Palaces and stuff he inherited, I guess. I’m just saying, he looks like a tattered old professor, but behind that fa?ade he burns through specie like a rap star.”
Devin was thinking. “You’re referring to the money in Torgai. Vast hoards of gold rumored to be just lying there for the taking.”
“Don’t be coy, man; we all know what those three thousand K’Shetriae were thinking. No one is going into the Torgai for its scenic beauty.”
“It is so obvious,” Devin marveled. “So. Friggin’. Obvious. He never cared about playing the game until there was money on the ground. Never went in once. Just wanted to”—and here Devin held his hands aloft and made fluttering motions with his fingers, like an airborne faerie sprinkling dew over rose petals—“craft ancient dead languages. Imbue the history of T’Rain with a grammar and a rhetoric.”
“And cash royalty checks.”
“Egg-ZACT-ly!” Devin snapped, looking around himself in a kind of shocked, prim way, as if he had never accepted one penny of compensation. “But the minute some Troll dumps a few tons of gold on the ground, he gets an account and turns into Ozzy Fucking Mandias.”
Richard’s instincts told him that, having gotten Skeletor into this state, the most effective way to keep him there would be to show exaggerated nonchalance. “Now, Devin,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “you said yourself that it was a team sport. And part of being on a team is having a captain or a pope or what have you.”
“I’ve had characters in the game since the beginning,” Devin said righteously. “Over a hundred of them.”
“So the database says,” Richard said.
“Now I won’t sit here and try to tell you that no one has ever sworn fealty to me. I run vassal networks, sure. Sometimes maybe three deep. You can’t understand the workings of the game unless you’ve played it at that level.”
Richard just kept nodding, raising his eyebrows from time to time in an I’m with you, buddy sort of effort.
“I could be seven deep!” Devin said. “Could have been years ago!” Meaning that his hierarchy of vassals would be seven tiers deep, enough to give him tens of millions of followers. Only one player in the game had ever gotten to that level. Richard had been just hours away from sending Egdod down to liquidate him when the player had choked on a bite of wurst, alone before his monitor screen in Ostheim vor der Rh?n, no one around to give him a Heimlich.
“I know that about you, Devin, and I do think it’s testimony to your, if I may say, midwestern sense of plain dealing and self-effacement that you have showed such restraint. Of course, one of the problems with us midwesterners is that—”
“We just let people run roughshod over us, yeah, I know that,” Devin said, with an involuntary flick of the eyes toward his steel building full of lawyers.
“Well,” Richard said, after a longish pause, “I don’t want to keep you from your training schedule.”
“S’okay, my doctor’s after me to ease up a little.”
“I’m actually on my way up to visit the family, but it seemed only fair to stop by and fill you in a little on my conversation with the Don.”
“Appreciate it,” Devin muttered, and then his eyes refocused. “Yeah, I heard you had some trouble with your niece?”
“Am still having it, actually.”
“She hasn’t turned up yet?”
Richard had vague misgivings about this phrasing, since it seemed to imply that Zula had some choice in the matter. He wondered how many other people were assuming that Zula had just decided to go on the lam and put her family through the torments of hell just because.
“Whatever trouble she’s in,” Richard said, “does not seem to have resolved.”
“Well. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Devin offered.
Richard couldn’t think of a polite way to say, You’re about to go do it, and so he just nodded.