Something occurred to me. “Hey,” I shouted. “Can demons swim?”
“No,” he admitted. “But you can’t stay in the water forever.”
“I don’t have to. I can swim to the city from here.” I used the mast like a kick board just to illustrate my point.
This was not an outcome that pleased Whomp. “I’ll destroy your ship and your house, kill all your slaves and everyone else who gets in my way if you don’t get out of the water and let me kill you!” Not the most convincing argument.
“Go ahead,” I said. “The boat’s already half-destroyed anyway.”
He picked up the heavy base of the mast and hurled it into the water. He missed me, but I gave him points for effort.
“You’re not nearly as charming when you’re not about to kill somebody,” I pointed out.
“Get back here!” he raged.
“Can’t,” I said. “Gotta go. But it was nice meeting you.”
Swimming off, I could hear him tearing apart my vessel piece by piece, his roaring growing more distant with each stroke.
* * *
It took me the rest of the night and part of the next morning to reach the city’s inner harbor. By then Whomp had destroyed most of the homes on the pier and killed dozens of people, many of whom didn’t even work for me. Midday, around the time I reached my main house in Carthage, the sufets had figured out that something horrible was happening outside the city walls and a garrison of soldiers was sent to deal with the problem. It took a couple of days, and there were a tremendous number of human casualties, but they did eventually take care of Whomp for me.
The subsequent inquiry uncovered the name of the merchant who was foolish enough to hire a demon. Guy had been a guest in my home dozens of times, which explained how he knew so much about my ledgers. He was sentenced to death.
And I got a good discount on two of his ships. So, like any good businessman, I came out ahead in the end.
But I never did learn why there are so few demons in the world.
Chapter 13
Got a visit from the man himself today. He wanted to see how I was holding up, or so he said. His real motive might have had something to do with Viktor, who I might just be getting to. Can’t have your top scientist asking difficult questions when you’re so close to success.
So, he kept going on about how this situation I’m in is “just temporary” and how I should “relax.” Because I’m supposed to be naïve enough to think he’ll actually let me walk out of here when this is all over. I told him to fuck off. Not the best way to get an extra helping at dinner, but whatever.
* * *
I looked again at the frozen image of Gary’s crushed face. What idiot set a demon on me? It seemed unlikely that a bounty was put on my head at the same time a demon was sent to hunt me down, so the most apparent conclusion was that the demon was another bounty hunter. Or at least he was hired by the same person. This is as stupid in modern times as it had been in ancient Carthage. Demons don’t do subtle. They may be motivated by money, but they’re also motivated by bloodlust, and usually the bloodlust wins. Possibly, the person who was behind all of this knew perfectly well that sending a demon would result in some collateral damage, and possibly he or she considered that acceptable. This did not compel me to surrender.
“Do you have any more?” I asked Tchekhy, waving the empty bottle at him.
He looked at me for the first time in two hours. “You need more?”
“I do,” I said. “Turns out there’s a demon chasing me.”
“There is a demon chasing all of us, my friend.”
“I mean literally. You find anything?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Feel like telling me what?”
He lit another cigarette and paused dramatically. Tchekhy can be very theatrical. “Come,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
I got up and half-staggered across the room as the vodka said hello to my motor skills. Perhaps another bottle wouldn’t be a good idea.
Tchekhy pointed to one of the monitors. “You are familiar with the Internet?”
“Of course I am,” I replied indignantly.
I was, in fact, only somewhat familiar with it. Try to look at this from my perspective. I remember getting drunk several of years ago with a guy named Bob who declared that “everything” in the world of computers changes completely “every eighteen months.” He went on with “honestly, you blink and you’re hopelessly behind.” That describes just about my whole existence. Nod off during the Restoration, next thing you know you’re right in the middle of the French Revolution, and you’re wondering what the hell just happened.
“Good,” Tchekhy said. “What you are looking at here is a MUD.”
“Okay.”
“Multi-User Dimension.”
“Okay.”
“It is fantasy. Role-playing. You understand?”
“Not even a little bit.”
He sighed heavily. “Many different people join a group, all right? It is a group where everyone pretends to be someone else in someplace else at some other time or some other world.”
“Why?”
“Why not? It is fun, these games of fantasy. I belong to two myself. I am a merchant in one and a warrior in another.”
“And this is fun? Because I’ve been both and they weren’t all that thrilling.”
“Very much. You trade, you fight monsters, solve puzzles… a welcome distraction.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Why are you showing me one?”
“Because this MUD is not like any I have seen before. It is playing out in the modern world.”
“Sounds healthy,” I noted, a tad sarcastically.
“Yes, but still with fantasy elements. There are vampires and demons and other magical creatures. And one immortal.”
“Pardon?”
“It would appear that one of the central goals of this MUD is to track an immortal man. Just reading along, it seems most of the participants treat this as a work of interactive fiction, but a few are taking it very seriously.”
He clicked an entry titled “Recent Pic.” It came with an attachment and in that attachment was a poorly reproduced image—of me.
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Oh shit, indeed,” agreed Tchekhy. “There is some out-of-character speculation that you are merely the person who is running the MUD, encouraging people to seek you out for some egotistic goal. But the ones who take it seriously accept you as an immortal, and seem to believe in the vampires and fairies as well.”
“They’re called pixies,” I said.
He looked at me carefully. “They are real?”
“Sure.”
“And demons?”
I held up the photo of Gary’s face. He grimaced. I returned to my computerized picture. “Does that photo include when and where it was taken?”
“It was captured seven months ago in Cleveland.”
That explained where the photograph in Stan’s kit had come from, as well as the “last known location” identifier.
“So, these… MUD people are tracking me?”
“That is the idea. Much honor is accorded anybody who captures your image and reports your current location. The rumor that you were in Boston had the Boston members wandering the streets with their digital cameras for several days. Shall I write that you have since left for New York?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” I was feeling sick. Might have been the vodka, but I didn’t think so. “How long has this been going on?”
“For over a year.”
“These people have been following me for a year? Whose idea was this?”
“That, I cannot know for certain. I have identified the screen name of the person running the MUD, but his email is fairly generic.” He referred to a second monitor. “Over here I am attempting to track the origin of the email. I sent a request to join this MUD and obtained an automated response. From that, I analyzed the source, a software company in South Dakota called InfoGen.”