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A dark-eyed man appeared before her so swiftly that she flinched. He was perhaps in his sixties, a tiny smile on his lined face, his white hair neat. The viewpoint drew back to show that he sat behind a desk in an old-fashioned office, something that might have belonged in a nineteenth-century embassy, teak furniture and heavy drapes on the windows.
My God, she thought. That's Jongleur. But this file is only a few years old, and he can't have looked like that in a hundred years.
Which meant nothing in VR, of course. What the hell difference when this was done—this is a guy who appears as some Egyptian god most of the time. . . .
The old man before her nodded his head once, then spoke, the voice public-school English with a tiny hint of something else, something more foreign, beneath.
"And so we meet, my son. Something we could never do while I was alive. I am anxious to tell you everything, and then you will understand why your life has been ordered in the way it has. But first you must tell me your name. Your true name, as it has been given to you, then we may proceed to the more prosaic forms of verifying identity."
My son? Dulcie sat without a thought of anything to say. She had clearly triggered the first half of some kind of dual-encryption, and now Jongleur—or his recorded sim, or his ghost, or whatever the hell this was—was waiting for the other half of the key.
"I wait for your true name," the old man said, a bit more of an edge in his voice. His eyes were quite mesmerizing, Dulcie thought as she waited helplessly—"commanding" is what they would have been called in a romance, although there was little romantic about this flinty old monarch. If he had looked anything like that in real life, it was easy to understand how he had built himself an empire.
"Your true name," the pseudo-Jongleur said for the third time. A moment later he was gone. The file had closed itself.
Dulcie rubbed her hand against her forehead and felt a film of sweat. She dropped out of the system. It was definitely time to take a break.
An hour later she sat staring at the Ushabti file. She was unwilling to open it again, or even examine it too closely, because things like this often had a built in number of attempts they would allow before simply self-destructing.
A search of available information on Jongleur had done nothing to illuminate the mystery. Not only had his actual sons and daughters died a century ago, but according to the best sources she could find there was nothing like a direct line of succession. All of his living relatives—the oldest still generations younger than Jongleur himself—were descendants of his cousins. He was not known to be close to any of them, nor did any of them have a role in the J Corporation.
As carefully as a specialist handling an unexploded bomb, Dulcie picked the Ushabti file out from the midst of the estate information and moved it onto her private system, then went back to work sorting files.
Dread could hide things? Dread wanted to keep secrets from her? Well, Dulcie could keep secrets of her own.
"Lets have another one," Dread decided. "This is interesting."
He waved his hand and a dark-haired, muscular man shuffled forward into the glare of torches and fell to his knees. His linen robes showed signs of having been costly once, but they were singed and torn, and his black wig sat askew.
"What's your name?" Dread asked him.
"Seneb, O Lord."
"And what do you do?" Dread turned to the woman beside him. "Kind of fu
"I . . . I am a m–m–merchant, O Great House." He was so terrified he could hardly speak.
"Tell me . . . hmmm. What did you have for breakfast this morning?"
Seneb paused, fearful of a wrong answer. "I . . . I had nothing, Lord. I have not eaten in two days."
Dread waved a huge, pitch-black hand. "The last time you had brekkie, then, mate. What did you have?"
"Bread, Lord. And a little beer." The man wrinkled his forehead, thinking desperately. "And a duck egg! Yes, a duck egg."
"See?" Dread gri
Seneb looked at the cowering priest, again unsure of the answer that was wanted. "He is a priest of Osiris, Lord. All the priests of Osiris are good men . . . are they not?"
"Well, since Osiris has stepped out for a while. . . ." Dread smirked. "I suppose we'll have to leave that question unanswered. But how about if I asked you to fight with him? To kill him if you can?"
Seneb, for all his beefy size, was trembling. That might have been in part because the jackal-headed god on the throne before him was twice human height. "If the great Lord wishes it," he said at last, "then I must do it."
Dread laughed. "See? Some of them can't wait to pitch into one of the priests. Some of the others think it's sacrilege and won't do it to save their own lives. It's bloody marvelous."
His guest looked at him uncomprehendingly.
"Don't you see?" Dread asked. "You can't predict anything here! God—no pun intended—but this is an impressive situation. They all are." He turned to Seneb. "If you kill him, I'll let you live."
Seneb stared shamefacedly at the priest, hesitating.
"What are you waiting for?"
"And . . . and my family?"
"You want to kill your family, too?" Dread barked a laugh. "Ah, I see, you want to know if I'll spare your family. Cheers. Why not?"
As the merchant Seneb raised his hands and lurched toward the priest, an older, frailer man who now moaned in fear. Dread shook his head in continued wonderment. It really was quite stu
He could almost see why someone like Jongleur thought he could spend an eternity in this place. Not that he could imagine such a thing himself, at least not in the immediate future. Dread had nearly exhausted most of the obvious ways of enjoying himself, and although he definitely pla
Still, there was fun to be had.
"Come on, admit it—you're rooting for one of them."
The woman beside him shut her mouth in a firm line. Dread smiled. This was much more fun than anything he could do with Dulcie, to whom he was still forced to show a friendly face. After all, there was still so much more he needed her for. He had a lot to learn about the Grail network, but now that he had confirmed the Old Man's continuing absence—Jongleur's private line had gone dead, and if he still was somewhere in the Grail system, he was as marooned as any of Dread's former companions had been—he needed her to find a way into Jongleur's personal files. He badly wanted information about the operating system, and also about things that mattered outside the small, hermetic world of the Otherland system.
With the Old Man's money and power, Dread thought happily, I can be a god in the real world, too. I can play these kind of tricks with real people. Industrial accidents. Biochemical releases, A few small wars when the mood strikes me. And then I'll have the Grail network to keep me alive.