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Chapter 19: The Nice Man Cometh
“Now,” the referee shouts, raising her speaking stone once again, “Silence your voices.” The crowd settles. “Set down your cups.” A clink resounds as ninety thousand glasses fall into ninety thousand cupholders. “And catch your breath.” One single, great inhalation passes over the crowd. “It’s time,” the referee says at last, her breathless voice amplified ten-thousand-fold by the loudspeakers, “For ROOOOUUUUND OOOONNNNE!”
Phyr looks over the crowd from the edge of the skybox, panning back and forth. He risks a glance squarely down at Vector and Alice, right at midfield: Vector is looking out over the teeming throng, while Alice sits patiently with her hands between her knees; two dozen guards surround them, weapons at the low ready and heads casting about warily.
Phyr takes his seat at Edric’s left hand. “I think we’re good,” he says.
Edric nods, and turns to his right. “Nori? How's comms?”
“Five by five, Boss,” she says eagerly.
Edric nods again, then raises a thumbs-up to the field below. The referee nods up at him, and announces the first match.
Round One is The Meat Grinder, a team melee for all entrants who did not (or could not) submit to the pre-tourney ranking process: teams square off in groups of eight, and whoever is left standing on the winning side advances to the next round. There are fourteen such teams over seven matches, each fought almost to a draw; only nine contenders emerge from the vicious melee. The menders tend hastily to the fallen, ensuring that no one dies. Phyr watches Edric expectantly; a bet, here or there, wouldn’t topple his empire. But it might betray his thoughts. Yet he does nothing of the kind: instead, he talks to Tamment, one of Nori's backups, about spread, vig, over-under, and a handful of other terms of which Phyr is only vaguely aware. He can tell what Edric is doing, but has no idea how to read his intentions in any actionable way. Of course, he thinks, Why would Edric make bets, if he runs the House?
Round Two is the Round-Robin: single combat for the ranked entrants and winners of the Meat Grinder, fought to the pain. Those with winning records advance, those with losing records are eliminated, and those with even records file into a side pool.
Round Three is another team melee, called the Factious Phalanx: those with the highest ranking after the Round-Robin are picked, in order, to form a single team the same size as the side pool of contestants. The team of winners will all advance to Round Four, whatever the outcome, encouraging camaraderie and teamwork; but those from the side pool are competing against each other, fomenting distrust and betrayal. When half the side pool team is eliminated, the match is called off, and those left standing are advanced.
Then Vector steps in for Round Four: The Culling. He has seen everyone fight, and he has been fed intelligence by Tam. Anyone who can go two minutes against Vector will advance. With a judicious rearrangement of his attributes, and a mighty fine staff, he eliminates a clean half of the contestants and resumes his place next to Alice on the sidelines.
At two in the afternoon, the quarter-finals are next. The referee takes centerfield and shouts into the speaking stone, “Half-time!” The crowd goes wild. Two marching bands trot out onto the field, and form into pigs. They play Ozzy - Crazy Train©, specifically - and then medley into Old MacDonald Had a Farm, while the pigs march into each other, and then “explode” into marching starbursts. Fireworks erupt overhead, and enough people ooh and ahh to make it all worthwhile.
As sausages, chicken, burgers, and steak sandwiches are sold by the thousands, a man dressed in sackcloth and rags walks toward the arena from Thousand Bridges. A roughspun hood is drawn low over his eyes. The guards at the gate watch with suspicion as he approaches - there hasn’t been a beggar in the city since Mister Nadab returned after the fall of the High Queen and King.
The man draws up short as the guards step from aside the entrance to block his path. “Hey, pal - everything all right,” one guard asks, his voice carrying more a tone of confusion than confrontation.
The man turns slightly in his direction, but does not lift his gaze. “Just here for the show,” he says in a gravelly voice.
The same guard looks to his partner, who makes a face to indicate with perfect clarity that her Creep Alarm has tripped. He looks back to the man and says, “Please step over here, sir,” gesturing for him to move to one side.
The man looks back to the city, and sees that no other spectators are near. Then he spreads his hands plaintively and says, “Guise. Relax.” The guards look at each other and share a self-conscious chuckle as they reflect on the fact that they were seriously going to pat down the nice man standing before them. One guard steps aside, and the other gives him a friendly pat on the shoulder as he passes. Both are entirely confident that they’ll share a laugh about this later over a beer.
Inside, the nice man makes his way through the arena with little effort. Wandering spectators, many with refreshments in hand or children in tow, are only too happy to make way as he passes. He strides confidently out of a vomitorium and walks right up to the front row. Spectators are crowded against the rails, pressing eagerly to get the best view they can. The nice man places a hand on the elbow of a solidly built half-giant woman, and she turns at his touch. She smiles when she sees him, and he says plainly, “I need to see.”
“Oh, of course,” she says in a sonorous contralto. Then she surveys the teeming throng before them, and starts moving people bodily to one side or the other. “The nice man needs to see,” she says, as though it were plain as day, any time someone scoffs or grunts in protest. Soon enough, the way is cleared, and he is able to look over the field and the stands. He draws back his hood, and grungy half-dyed locks fall stiffly into place about his filthy head.
He pans this way and that, searching, searching, searching. His gaze settles momentarily on each skybox, until he sees Edric and Phyr - he lingers for a moment, and then he is once again searching, searching. Then he sees Vector, Alice, and her security detail, and he focuses for a moment more. Then he is once again searching. As he looks over the obvious guard postings and the regularly-spaced vomitoria, his Guise wears off, and the nearby spectators begin to be irritated by his presence. He turns with a wave of his hand and walks off. The crowd parts once again, but this time with looks of disgust and horror as he passes. They wrinkle their noses at his smell in the confines of the concrete hall, and look disdainfully at his shabby rags.
Half-time is over and the quarter-final has begun in earnest by the time the bedraggled wanderer has made his way to his next destination. He casts Guise again as he approaches Alice’s security detail.
Alice takes a deep breath in and stops fidgeting with the hem of her royal blue silk dress. Something is different; something has shifted. She could See the disturbance, several minutes ago, right at the entrance of the arena. It was only by luck - she had been Looking at all the entrances, the passages, and over the crowd, as the tourney progressed. But something had been coming for quite some time, almost two weeks now.
The way it happened was also strange: she would See a village, or a town, or one of the smaller cities of Altilluvia, from far off. Then she would See people start dying - sometimes it was violent and catastrophic, but other times it was the most normal and natural thing in the world. Then the whole place would disappear, just like Noob Town had. It had been hard for her to spot at first; there were simply blind spots in her Vision, but as it happened over and over again she had learned how to Look for the blind spots. It helped that they were all in a rough line heading straight from the Notosynoro Mountain Rim toward Thousand Bridges.
By rights, it should be here, today. She has been on high alert throughout the tourney, casting her Gaze hither and yon with increasing worry. Then it was right there, just outside; and then it came in, and everything seemed… fine? But then a minute or two later, it wasn’t - and she was back at Defcon 1. She couldn’t alert the guards - not even Vector - they would almost certainly think it was a ruse. So she watched and waited. And now, in the space of a single breath, everything seems nice and normal again.
Alice breathes out, relaxed. So this is what one of those blind spots looks like from the inside, she thinks calmly. I wonder what that’s all about? She shrugs and turns her Gaze back to the fight: an ether-knight against a hex-snare. It’s an excellent match, for each is proficient in arts arcane and martial; but while the ether-knight is offensively built to pierce defenses, the hex-snare is all about field control and subverting an opponent’s advances. Spell and counterspell, thrust and parry, each move and counter sends ripples through the ethereal stream as it cascades through the world before her. Then she hears someone say in a rather nice voice, “I just need Alice.”
The guard says, “Oh, of course,” and Alice can See the guard step aside, but she cannot See whoever it is that spoke her name. Strange, she thinks, I wonder if this has something to do with all those places that have been falling off the map?
A hand falls on her shoulder unSeen, and the nice voice says, “Come with me.”
Alice says, “OK,” and follows the nice man who has taken her hand - kindly so, as she cannot See him. He leads her down into the maintenance tunnels beneath the arena, all concrete surfaces and steel pipes, through twists and turns that would have her lost if she were not able to See through walls.
Then they stop, and suddenly, something slams into her gut. The wind is knocked out of her, and she doubles over. The stranger’s Guise breaks, and right away, Alice registers his stench in the claustrophobic tunnels. She tries to say something, but she is sucking wind, and it’s hard to catch her breath amid the foul odor.
Then he strikes her face. Then again. And again.
The surprise attack has her down on hands and knees, and she pulls back into a defensive posture, trying to gather her wits. Then it hits her in a flash: He’s void-touched, she thinks. That’s why I can’t See him, or anything he does. She tries to think about how she could fight against a foe she can neither see nor See - no mortal has been void-touched since the Death’s Hand Insurrection, which led to the formal outlawing of necromancy and other void magics under the Har’tei Regime.
Alice’s turn passes by in her stunned reverie. Then she hears the man say in his gravelly voice, “Choke.”
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