Reamde

It being the 1970s, and Chet being a high school dropout with a damaged brain, he could not help but perceive something huge in this discovery. Nor could he avoid coming to the conclusion that the mistake he had made on that beautiful moonlit night had been a sort of message from above, a warning that, during the grubby, day-to-day work of small-town pot dealing, he had been failing to attend to larger and more cosmic matters.

He had moved west, as Americans did in those days when they were searching for the cosmic. A few hundred miles short of the Pacific, he had fallen in with the biker group that collaborated with Richard on his backpack smuggling scheme. Among them he had acquired a sort of shamanistic aura and become the high priest of a breakaway faction calling itself the Septentrion Paladins to distinguish themselves from their predominantly Californian parent group. They had moved north of the border and established themselves in southern B.C. A second, near-fatal crash had only enhanced Chet’s mystical reputation.

Not long after Chet had been released from the hospital after the second crash, the Septentrion Paladins had embarked on a project to, as Chet put it, “get in touch with our masculinity.”

When this policy initiative had abruptly been made known to Richard in the middle of a barroom conversation on seemingly unrelated topics, awe and horror had struggled for supremacy in his mammalian brain as his reptilian had begun to tally all exits, conventional and un-, from the bar; lubricated his whole body with sweat; and jacked his pulse rate up into a frequency range that had probably jammed Mounties’ radar guns out on Highway 22. For he had known these men all too well in their premasculine days and could not imagine what they were about to get up to now. Over the course of the next few minutes’ marginally coherent discussion, however, he pieced together that what Chet really meant was that they would stay in touch with their masculinity but with a more modest body count. The change in emphasis seemed to coincide with some of the surviving principals’ getting married and having kids. They got rid of most of their guns and took advantage of Canada’s surprisingly easygoing sword laws, riding around the provincial byways with five-foot claymores strapped to their backs. They met in forest clearings to engage in mock duels and jousts with foam weapons, and they went to Ren Faires to hoist tankards with their newfound soul brothers in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Roaring down the byways of southern B.C. with the cross hilts of their claymores projecting above their shoulders, they had become a familiar feature of that self-consciously quirky part of the world. Barely visible behind concentric shells of tinted glass and perforated sunscreens, children in minivans had pointed to them and waved with lavish enthusiasm. The Septentrion Paladins had become the subjects of offbeat-slash-heartwarming featurettes on regional television news broad-casts, and they had ceased to commit crimes.

TURNING HIS ATTENTION back to matters inside the plane’s cabin, Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course), created by a microdepartment operating out of the Seattle office, which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours: notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines, untoward spikes in commodity prices.

TORGAI MORTALITY HITS 1,000,000% MARK

(compiled from reports by Gazette correspondents Gresh’nakh the Forsaken, Erikk Blöodmace, and Lady Lacewing of Faërie)

Torgai Foothills—The mortality rate in this unexpectedly war-ravaged region today skyrocketed through one million percent. Local observers attributed the unusual figure to an “epochal” influx of outsiders, compelled, by as yet unexplained astral phenomena, to pay tribute to a local troll. The visitors or, as they have come to be known to locals, “Meat,” are laden with tribute and hence make tempting targets for highwaymen (the one million percent benchmark is considered by analysts to be an important psychological barrier that separates a war-ravaged inferno from a chiliastic gore storm).