Egdod was the first player-character that had ever been created in T’Rain, not counting a number of titans, gods, demigods, and so on that had been set up in order to build the world and that were not owned by any one player. He had his own personal home zone, a towering fortress of solitude constructed on the top of one of T’Rain’s highest mountains and decorated with artifacts that Egdod had looted from various palaces and ruins that he’d had a hand in conquering. Egdod was so famous that Richard could not even take him out of doors without first concealing his identity behind a many-layered screen of spells, wards, disguises, and enchantments whose purpose was to make him look like a much less powerful, but still way-too-puissant-to-fuck-with character. Even the simplest of these spells was far beyond the powers of all but a few hundred of T’Rain’s most powerful denizens. Richard had written a script that invoked them all automatically, with a single keystroke; otherwise it would have taken him half an hour. Each spell triggered its own custom-designed light show and sound effects extravaganza, the latter propagating through the building thanks to the oversized subwoofers with which this conference room had been supplied, and so awareness that Egdod was being aired out spread through neighboring offices by subsonic vibration and then throughout the rest of the building by text message, and curious employees began to congregate in the doorway of the conference room, not daring to cross its threshold, just wanting to catch a glimpse of the event, in somewhat the same spirit that navy veterans would gather on the shore to watch the battle-ship Missouri being towed to a new berth. Which was not to imply that a warship of that class would have stood much of a chance against the firepower of an Egdod. A direct hit from an ICBM might have mussed Egdod’s hair—which, predictably, was white, in a God of the Old Testament do. Richard longed to swap it for something a little more against-the-grain, and when Egdod was in disguise, he always did. But once in a blue moon, Egdod had to appear in his true avatar to kill a god, divert a comet, or carry out some ceremonial function, and at those times it was necessary that he look the part. As the successive magic wrappers were laid down, however, this awe-inspiring figure and his harbingers and vanguards, his encloaking energy-nimbi and meteorological accoutrements, got stripped away and snuffed out, and finally Egdod himself altered his appearance to that of a somewhat pixieish, vaguely elven-looking young female with spiky dark hair. At this point the crowd in the doorway dispersed, except for a few who wanted to linger and get a view of Egdod’s fortress from inside.
Gravity was of no more concern to Egdod than crabgrass to an archangel, so he could have taken flight directly from any balcony or open window, but the Torgai Foothills were six thousand miles away, which was a long trip even at the supersonic velocities of which Egdod was capable. So instead he made use of the ley line intersection that was directly beneath the mountain. Wary of being followed out of the Bagpipe Gulch intersection, he went to another LLI about a hundred miles away, underneath a large city that bestrode a great river flowing down out of the mountain range above the Torgai. But even this place had been thrown all out of whack by REAMDE, with long queues outside the moneychangers’ kiosks and healing potions at such a premium that they were being auctioned in the town square for ten times their usual market price. On his way to the city gates, Egdod was accosted several times by bands of warriors who assumed that he, or rather the spiky-haired pixie he was pretending to be, had come here to pay ransom in the Torgai Foothills. Don’t even think of going up there alone, was the general tenor of their remarks; pay us enough and we’ll escort you to the proper coordinates. Richard got rid of them quickly just by claiming that his/her errand had nothing to do with REAMDE. At the first opportunity, he made the character invisible and then, just in case he was being followed, superinvisible and then double-super and then hyperinvisible. For run-of-the-mill invisibility spells could be penetrated by countermeasures of varying strengths. Satisfied that no one could plausibly see him/her, he/she took to the air and flew the hundred miles to Torgai in a few minutes, plunging to treetop level at the end and flying nap-of-the-earth to get a better view of what was going on down there.
A lot was the quick answer.
Not that Richard didn’t already know this; but there was something about actually seeing it.
And besides, this was almost kind of like his job now. The CEO, who had actual responsibilities, could get by with reading the summaries and maybe allow himself to be seen checking out the T’Rain Gazette during his coffee break. But actually going to the place was a waste of his shockingly expensive time. Richard, however, as founder/chairman, receiving only token compensation, was almost expected to go and view spectacles of this kind, in roughly the same way that the Queen of England was expected to fly over derailments in a chopper.
A key difference was that he got to have inappropriate emotional responses. “This is fucking cool,” he remarked, gazing down from an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet at a corpse-and skeleton-strewn meadow where something like twenty different Medieval Armed Combat encounters were going on simultaneously. “We should pay these guys to do this all the time.”
“Which guys?”
“Whoever created this virus.”
“Oh.”
“Who did create it, by the way?”
“Unknown,” C-plus said, “but thanks to your niece, we’re pretty sure he’s in Xiamen.”
“The place with the terra-cotta soldiers?”
“No, you’re thinking of Xian.”
“Zula’s been helping you track these guys down?”
C-plus looked a bit taken aback. “I thought you were aware of it.”
“Of what?”
“Her participation. She said it was a side project that you had put her on.”
Had it been anyone else, Richard would have said, I have no idea what the hell you are talking about, but since it was family, his instinct was to cover for her. “There may have been some mission drift,” he speculated.
“Whatever. Anyway, we have an IP address in Xiamen, but nothing else.”
Richard put Egdod into auto-hover mode, then leaned back and took his hands off the controls. “Are the Chinese cops among those who have been pestering us to do something about this?”
“They were among the first to do so, is my understanding.”
“Then one way to shut them up—”
“—is to ask them to trace down this IP address for us. Yes, I agree; we would never hear from them again.”
“So are we going to do that?”
“I doubt it,” C-plus said, “because we’d be giving up information about our own internal procedures. And I’m pretty sure Nolan doesn’t want to do that.”
“And, come to think of it, I’m sure Nolan’s right,” Richard said. “I’m an idiot. Let’s not tell the Chinese government anything.”
“Are you asking me to pass that on to our CEO?” Corvallis said, in a tone of voice making it clear that, if flat out asked, he’d flat out refuse.
“Nah,” Richard said, “I have other reasons to ruin his day.”
Day 2
In the dark, driving through Xiamen was like driving through any other modern city, save that they were more exuberant, here, about lighting things up; the highway was illuminated with dashed lines of blue neon, and bright signs, some familiar corporate logos and others unreadable by Zula, erupted from the tops of buildings.
They stopped at a brand-new Hyatt not far from the airport and dropped off the two pilots. Then they followed what she took to be a ring road, since water was always on their right, until they were in the middle of what had to be the most crowded and built-up part of the island. This was more than a match for Seattle. The waterfront to their right was an unbroken series of low-slung passenger ferry terminals. To their left was a mixture of buildings: some brand-new skyscrapers, some pre-economic-miracle hotels and office structures rising to perhaps ten or fifteen stories, some vacant lots-cum-construction-sites, and a few tenacious patches of old three-to seven-story residential neighborhood buildings.