Keenley glanced back to see the dog-creature that was apparently coming with them now. Father Ginnsley had stopped at the coach house to enquire about transportation, and the continued lack of conversation was getting awkward. The creature was loitering near the gatepost and drumming its fingers on the wood rhythmically, albeit not very well.

“My name’s Keenley,”

“Hm?” The creature glanced up as if he hadn’t noticed him before. “Oh, hi.”

“I haven’t seen anyone like you before,” Keenley ventured. “Where are you from?”

“I don’t think you’ve heard of it,” the creature said offhandedly. “Wait! You’ve never seen someone like me before? Never? Sod!” The creature grumbled something Keenley didn’t hear properly. “I’m a gnoll, we’re usually fairly common in places like this, just like gnomes or kobolds.”

“I’ve never seen a gnome either,” Keenley said. “What’s a kobold?”

“Sod!”

“I’m sorry... Maybe all the other gnolls prefer to live somewhere cooler.”

“Yeah, sure kid, that must be right.” The creature looked him over. “So who are you?”

“I told you, my name is Keenley. I’m a learner at the temple. Father Ginnsley told me to come with him. What about you?”

“My name’s, errrm… Jeff. Can you just hang on a bit?” the creature didn’t bother to wait for an answer, it just turned and walked a short distance away and peered into its bag.

* * *

“Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!” Paley flexed her fingers and gritted her teeth. Nothing she’d tried was working. Snafu continued beside her, dutifully reading the code for any of the parameters she had instructed it to look for and bring to her attention.

“Paley!” A dog-like face was talking from Paley’s auxiliary monitor with a voice she knew all too well. “Dammit Paley this is the sixth message I’ve left you.” Jeff shouted.

“Seventh,” she corrected him without bothering to look up, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her, perhaps because he couldn’t. She’d been trying to establish communication access to his personal console for nearly two hours without any success, and she was beginning to wish she hadn’t found this saved message folder.

“They’ve never heard of gnolls here, Paley. How can you have a fantasy world without any gnolls in it? Next thing you’ll tell me there are no dragons, or the elves don’t have pointy ears. You’d better not have skimped on the pointy ears.”

“Heaven forbid I might do something original for a change,” Paley muttered, almost at full volume.

Initially when Jeff had disappeared she’d assumed he’d logged out of the system and was waking up in the real-world. Rather than log out herself, she thought she’d better figure out what was going on, so that when he harangued her about this system error she’d have an answer for him. It also seemed a good idea to wait until he’d had time to calm down before trying to talk to him in person about something she knew he would blame her for - even though it was almost certainly a direct result of his monkey-knuckled meddling with her carefully constructed program code.

When she’d checked his real-world status monitor it said his port was still engaged.

He had to be inside.

If he wasn’t in the throne room with her - and he would certainly have made it known if he was - then he must have been phased to Utopia.

If he hadn’t immediately phased back, then he was probably unable to.

And if he hadn’t established a communication link to yell at her, then he probably couldn’t do that either.

If he couldn’t open direct communication to her in the throne room, then it was likely that he couldn’t communicate with the real-world either.

The real-time / virtual-time differential being what it was, she knew that if she or Jeff had been able to contact the real-world, and a technician took a minute or so to notice it, then she could expect a simple text response in about a year.

She did consider simply logging herself out and then doing a cold disconnect to get Jeff out as well, but the last time anyone did that was not pleasant, and also not without significant risk of permanent damage. That idea was also likely to equate to, at best, several years of internal time with Jeff still trapped alone inside the system waiting to get out, and with no established means of communication. She really didn’t want to have to face Jeff in person after he had to manage on his own for three years and then gone through an unexpected cold disconnect. The only good part of that plan is that Jeff would probably be comatose for the first hour or two, and certainly physically unable to yell at her for at least a day.

All told, Paley’s best option was to do what she could to establish communication and let Jeff know she was dealing with things, and then determine what was going on. Perhaps once she’d figured out what had happened she could find a way to get Jeff back to the throne room in the next few hours and they could both log out normally.

She opened a video recording console and set it to save to the folder where Jeff had left his previous messages. Out of habit, she gestured to push her hair back away from her face and straighten her glasses, even though they were virtual hair and glasses and never moved out of place.

“Jeff, it’s me.” she considered correcting herself and calling him Great God, but chose not to. “I’m trying to figure out what happened…”

* * *

“...I’m trying to figure out what happened and how to get you back” Jeff glared at the face of Paley in his crystal orb. She couldn’t see him, so she wouldn’t know that he was angry that she’d called him Jeff again, he’d have to remember it and shout at her later. She continued, “I’ve alerted the duty-technician that we may need a cold disconnect, but the time differential was set fairly high while you were playing your game, so a minute of real-time is about six months your time. It’ll be a long wait for them to respond. I might be able to change the speed here if I can get you back, but I can’t slow it down system wide. Large portions of code are locked up or hidden or something.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “Look, I need you to hold tight. Find somewhere nice and maybe think of it as a camping holiday or something. There are dragons out there, please don’t go looking for one. I don’t know what’ll happen to you if you die while your god-mode is disabled. I’ll contact you again as soon as I have more information.”

Paley’s face vanished from the console.

“Great.” He sighed. “So the expert says to pretend you’re on holiday and try not to get eaten by a dragon, because we might be able to save you in six months. She’s so fired when I get out of here.” Jeff placed his console-orb back in his bag. “When I get out of here, I’m gonna fire her so hard her grandchildren will be unemployed.” He smirked at that thought, but no one was listening and somehow it felt less funny than it deserved. He decided to blame her for that too.

* * *

Harrington took a long glass shard from his bag and held it up in the exact centre of his office. The marks he had put in the floor and walls were precisely coordinated to ensure that the shard was just where it needed to be for the spell he was about to cast.

He spoke the incantation he had previously constructed and memorised. The shard hovered before his face. It was finally time to make himself known to the Great God. He spoke the words of invocation, instructing the Great God that an audience was required. There was an uncomfortably long pause.

“Who dares to call upon me?” The huge purple face of the Great God Avatar shimmered into existence before him, filling the room. It glowered down at him. He bowed low, a long, sweeping gesture, carefully measured with the right amount of flourish to appear formal and grandiose in its feigned humility.

“I am Grand Inquisitor Regis Harrington, Great One, your humble servant.” He kept his arms and hands open wide and his head slightly bowed in a sign of reverence, so that he was talking to the Great God’s semi-transparent chin, a little higher than Harrington’s knees. “I have reason to suspect that there are heretics conspiring against you. Father Ginnsley, who serves here at Amin Thiering as Senior Theologian, has taken one of the students and fled after breaking the prayer glass that we keep in the tower. It seems feasible that his intention was to ensure that we could not inform you of their plans, should they be discovered.”

The Great God remained silent, so Father Harrington continued. “I am, as yet, unaware of how deep this conspiracy goes, or how many are involved, but with your endorsement, I will find them out and put a swift end to any untoward behaviour.”

Harrington raised his eyes to see if the Great God was pleased with his proposal. The Great God remained silent, coldly processing the information.

“Endorsement: granted. This conspiracy may be more pervasive than is apparent. The Harrington will ascertain the truth about the heresy. Any and all conspirators against the Great God will be located and deleted. None shall defy. Avatar alone is God. Avatar will not be content to share his throne room.”

The shimmering face of the Great God winked out of existence abruptly. With a touch of disappointment, Harrington reclaimed the hovering shard from the air. He had hoped for some acknowledgement of his faithfulness or vigilance. Clearly he would need to prove himself worthy of such an honour. Of course, it had been silly of him to think that the Great God would commend him for simply doing his duty.

He forced himself to turn his attention to the task at hand. It would not be difficult to locate them again, but before he confronted them he would need to search Ginnsley’s study for clear evidence of heresy, or anything that might provide a clue to where he might be headed and more importantly what he was up to and what he wanted with the shoemaker’s child and the prayer glass.

Before he could bring them before the Council of Inquisitors there would need to be substantial evidence of heresy and he would need to have established a clear concept of what they were up to. The appropriate steps would need to have occurred in the proper order.

Harrington, as a Grand Inquisitor, was fairly certain that he was a more powerful sorcerer than Ginnsley, after all, Ginnsley had never made any attempt to become recognised as an Inquisitor, that might suggest he was not confident he could match skills with the likes of the members of the Inquisitorial Council. But the problem was that he couldn’t be certain, Ginnsley’s prowess in combat sorcery was an unknown quantity.

Harrington had long been considering how he might deal with Ginnsley, but he could do little without a better understanding of where Ginnsley’s strengths and weaknesses lay. Ginnsley was certainly knowledgeable about Vexa, though he frequently used it differently than the authorised teaching. Harrington had extrapolated from his observations that Ginnsley had some kind of shortcut that allowed him to cast complex spells more quickly than most, but despite using spies to secretly monitor Ginnsley’s reading habits and spending a great deal of time reading all of his published works and any classes he taught looking for clues, had been unable to figure out how it worked.

He picked up his ring of keys from the table. This situation was not quite like the one he had imagined, but elements of his plan would still be appropriate, with minor modifications. His next course of action was clear. He would search Ginnsley’s room first, then the students’ rooms. After that he would need to make a final stop in the school’s Museum of Magical Artefacts.

Next Chapter: vii 0000111-07