He planned it like a boss fight.
That evening, on the castle round, he emptied his inventory of everything he didn't need: the sword, three helmets, two scimitars, and last of all Lozar's iron dagger. The shopkeeper paid seventy-two coins for the lot and didn't ask a single question, which was new. Tam didn't let himself think about the dagger until he was out in the street. Then he did, for a while. He had buried her. She would have wanted it used, he decided, and somebody would use it.
He didn't stay for supper. He took a heel of bread up to the loft, and went through the plan in his head while the farm hands ate in the farmhouse. The pyre was cold, the goblins were buried, and Hobart had gone home. He wanted to be somewhere else for a while. He used to plan like this on stream.
Minigame Teleport. A fight broke it off. Home Teleport kept its own separate wait, so he could go out by one spell and come home by the other.
Soul Wars. That teleport took you to a camp on the Isle of Souls, an island far out in the western sea. The camp belonged to a man called Nomad, who ran a game there that two armies played for points.
The island. Wild cows and chickens in the south-west, belonging to nobody. Moss giants in the middle and pyrefiends, small fire demons, in the far north-east, both not for him. And on the beaches, sand crabs, which looked exactly like sandy rocks until they bit you.
What I want: Strength. A cow had eight hitpoints and hit for one, which made it the best thing to swing a scimitar at. Strength first, to raise his max hit, then Attack and Defence. Skinning, butchering and cooking would give Cooking experience on the side.
What I don't want: to die on a beach a thousand miles from anyone who'd bury me.
He went over it twice. Then he went to find Seth.
* * *
Seth was at the woodpile, splitting kindling. He looked up as Tam came around the corner of the barn.
"I promised to tell you," said Tam. "Before every fight."
Seth put down the axe. "Goblins?"
"Cows."
Seth stared. "Cows."
"I'm going to fight some cows."
"Whose cows?"
"Nobody's."
"There's no such thing," said Seth, "as nobody's cows."
"There is where I'm going."
"And where's that?"
Tam thought about it. "Far," he said.
Seth looked at him over the woodpile. Tam could see him adding it up: the drowning, the things that fell, the boy who came home from the swamp in a bronze helmet faster than he'd gone. Varrock, at the end of the summer. Seth didn't ask any more.
"Be back by bedtime," he said, and picked up the axe again.
* * *
He cast it from the loft, with the farm hands out at the pub and the hatch down.
The spellbook. Minigame Teleport. A long list of places, most of them grey. Among the bright ones were Castle Wars, the Fight Pit inside the volcano, and Soul Wars.
He chose Soul Wars.
The light gathered at his feet, the same as Home Teleport's, and climbed. He kept very still and counted. Nothing touched him. At fourteen came the lurch. The loft went thin around the edges, and then it was gone.
* * *
He was standing on grass, in the open air, under a much bigger sky.
The first thing that hit him was the wind. It came straight off the sea, cold and full of salt. It nearly took him off his feet. The second thing was the smell: sea, grass, smoke and something sharp and strange underneath, like the air after lightning. The third was the sun. It stood higher than he'd left it at home. The Isle lay so far out in the west that its evening came later.
He was at the edge of a camp. There were a dozen big tents of patched grey canvas, staked down hard against the wind. Banners snapped on poles, one red and one blue. Beyond the tents, on a low hill, two twisted pale trees leaned together, wound with leafy vines, and between them hung a glowing disc of yellow-green light. A portal. And beyond that, in every direction, there was the island: rolling green and grey, with dark woods and bare rock, falling away to the sea.
He'd made it. It was real.
Chat, he thought, before he could stop himself, we're on the island.
Then he did what he had planned to do first. He opened his spellbook again and looked at Minigame Teleport.
You need to wait another 20 minutes to cast this spell.
He looked at Lumbridge Home Teleport. It was bright. Ready.
He let out a long breath. If that had been wrong, he'd have been stuck on an island at the end of the world with no way home but a ship he couldn't pay for.
"You," said a voice behind him. "You didn't come through the portal."
* * *
The man wore pale plate armour, bone-white, with purple stones set into the shoulders and the chest, and a green cloak that cracked in the wind. His face was hidden behind a pale mask shaped like a skull, with a green scarf wrapped over the mouth of it. He carried a jagged white staff that looked as if it had been carved from one enormous bone. Beside him stood something small and red. It had horns, yellow eyes, one big bat wing, green boots and a little spear, and it was grinning.
Nomad, thought Tam. Apart from the camp, all he knew about him was that he was a warrior-mage, a powerful one, with an imp he'd caught and kept.
"No," said Tam. "I didn't come through the portal."
"Nobody comes here except through the portal." Nomad looked him up and down: the shirt, the bronze helmet, the cheap scimitar. "And yet here you are."
"Here I am."
"How?"
Tam thought about lying, and decided not to. He had the feeling it would be a bad idea with this man.
"Magic," he said. "Not very much of it."
Nomad studied him through the eyeholes of the mask. Tam was sure he was smiling under it, and didn't like it.
"Interesting," said Nomad. "What do you want on my island, little magician?"
"Your cows," said Tam. "If they're yours."
"They're nobody's." The imp at his side snickered. "This island was empty for longer than anyone remembers before I came. The beasts went wild long ago. Take what you like." Nomad turned away, his cloak swirling. Over his shoulder he added, "Stay out of my games. And mind where you sit."
"Where I sit?"
But Nomad was already walking back among the tents, and the imp was trotting after him, making rude faces at Tam over its one wing.
* * *
The cows were in the south-west, where the game kept them. It took him most of an hour to walk there through the long grass, with the wind pushing at him the whole way. The island was much bigger than the game's, but it was the game's shape, and he knew which way to go.
He came over a low rise, and there they were.
They weren't Seth's cows. They were smaller, shaggier and wilder, and their horns were longer. They grazed in a loose herd on a slope of rough grass above a grey beach. They lifted their heads and watched him come. Among them, in the long grass, there were chickens, scratching and pecking. They were scrawny brown things that ran when he got close and came back when he stopped.
In the game, if you examined a cow, it said: Converts grass to beef. Tam watched the nearest one chewing.
Nobody's, he thought. Let's find out.
He checked the scimitar was on slash, for Strength, and picked the nearest cow.
Cows were bigger than goblins, slower and stupider, but they had horns. The first one hit him with them. It was like being pushed hard by a wardrobe.
Hitpoints: 9/10.
He slashed it, and slashed it. It took a long time, because his Strength was 1 and the scimitar hit for one at best. Then the cow folded up in the grass. He stood over it, breathing hard.
+4 Strength, eight times over.
Nobody shouted. Nobody came. The other cows went on eating.
He didn't try to take a whole cow home. A cow weighed as much as five men, and he wasn't going to find out what the inventory made of that. So he did it here. He took out his knife and skinned it, and butchered it. A cow was a great deal of cow. It took a while.
+10 Cooking.
Ten for a whole cow, he thought. The same as a goblin. That seemed unfair to the cow.
He cut off a good piece of beef and let the inventory take it. Then he cut a second piece, from the other side, and tried again.
It wouldn't go. It sat in his hand, a red lump of meat, and the inventory simply didn't want it.
One beef, he thought. In the game, a cow dropped one beef, one hide and one set of bones. Not a whole cow's worth. He tried the bones next, cleaned out of the carcass. One set went in. He cut out more bones. They wouldn't go. The inventory took the game's drop, and the rest of the cow was just cow.
He laughed so loud the next cow looked up.
He left the hide on the grass. It had never been in his inventory, so it would lie there like any skin, for the foxes and the gulls. He couldn't tan it yet. Tomorrow he needed every square for ore. Next time, he told it.
He cut a dead tree at the edge of the slope, lit a fire on the stones above the beach, and cooked the one beef the cow had given him. It came out brown and sizzling, and gave him thirty Cooking experience. He ate it. He dug a hole with his spade and buried the bones.
+4.5 Prayer.
Then the next cow.
* * *
It became a rhythm. Slash, skin, butcher, next cow. He kept one fire going on the stones above the beach, and every time it burned out and he lit it again, his feet stepped aside. When his squares filled, he cooked the beef there in a batch and buried the bones in one long trench. Then he moved on along the herd.
Strength came up on the second cow. Then again, and again, and again, so often he stopped reading the words and just felt the warmth go down his arms. Around the fifth cow the scimitar started hitting for two, and the cows went down faster. He ate a piece of beef when the cows got a hit in. Once he ate two.
By the time the light began to go gold and long across the grass, he had killed fifty cows, and his Strength was 12. On the last cow, the scimitar hit for three.
His arms ached all the way to his teeth. His hands stank. And on the slope behind him lay fifty hides he couldn't keep. In the game, he wouldn't have thought twice about leaving them.
He thought twice about it now. Then he left them anyway.
* * *
In a hollow above the beach, he found the spot where, in the game, a big fishing net and a hammer lay waiting for anyone who came by.
There was a net there. Or there had been. It was a grey, rotten tangle half sunk in the turf, with grass growing up through the holes. When he lifted a corner, it fell to pieces in his hand. Beside it, in the grass, lay a hammer head, rusted into a single brown lump. The handle had rotted away years ago.
He stood and looked at them.
In the game, if you took that net, another one appeared on the same spot a few seconds later. You could have taken a thousand. Here, somebody had left one net and one hammer long ago, and nobody had come back for them.
* * *
He should have gone home then. He knew it. But the island's mine was only a little way east, and in the game it had three iron rocks so close together you could mine all three without moving your feet.
It was further than he thought. Everything was. The mine was a bare grey hollow above the shore, full of broken rock. The iron rocks were exactly where the game had put them: three of them together, streaked with rusty red. He took out his pickaxe, just to see, and swung. The pick bounced off the rock and jarred his whole arm, and words came up in the air in front of him.
You need a Mining level of 15 to mine this rock.
Yep, he thought, rubbing his elbow. Same as the game. He was Mining 8. He put his pickaxe away.
Far off on the island's north side, a patch of something pale blue nodded in the wind: a field of flax, gone wild. In the game, you needed Crafting 10 to spin flax into bowstrings. Not yet.
Up the slope to the north-east, in the trees on the hillside, he saw the moss giants.
There were three of them, a long way off and very, very big. Each one was as tall as two men, green-skinned and long-armed, with a huge orange-brown beard that seemed to grow all on its own. One of them was dragging a club as big as a fence post. In the game they were level 42. He was level 8.
He went on very quietly, keeping the beach between himself and the trees, and didn't breathe properly until he was well past.
* * *
He was very tired by then. His legs ached from the walk, and his arms from the cows. The sun was half under the sea. He came down onto the beach for a rest. There was a nice flat sandy rock at the top of it, just the right height.
He sat down on it.
The rock moved.
It moved under him with a horrible grinding shrug. Then a pair of claws as big as fire tongs came out from under the sand on either side of his legs. One of them closed on his calf.
Hitpoints: 11/12.
He went off that rock like a cork out of a bottle and landed on the stones on his hands and knees. Behind him the rock heaved itself up out of the sand. It was a crab the size of a barrel, pale and sandy, and somehow it looked deeply offended.
Sand crab, he thought, scrambling backward. Level 15. Hits for one. Lots and lots of hitpoints. Looks exactly like a rock.
I knew that. It was in the plan.
Mind where you sit, Nomad had said.
He ran. The crab came after him, sideways, at a surprising speed. It snapped at his heels twice, missed twice, then lost interest and settled back into the sand. In a few heartbeats it was a rock again. It was very convincing.
Tam stood on the stony beach a safe way off, breathing hard. He looked along the beach in the last of the light. Now that he knew what to look for, there were sandy rocks everywhere. Dozens of them. All exactly the right height for sitting on.
* * *
He counted ten slow seconds, to be sure the crab had stopped counting as a fight. He looked around for anything that wanted a fight. Then he cast Home Teleport.
The light, the count, and then the lurch.
He landed in the castle courtyard in the dark, with the gates shut and the lantern burning by the gatehouse. The big guard with the dented helmet looked up from his stool, sighed and sniffed.
"Sleepwalker," he said. "You smell of cow."
"I've been fighting cows."
"Sure you have," said the guard, and got up to slide the bar off the little door.
* * *
He walked home over the bridge in the dark. There was a red mark on his calf where the crab had nipped it. He had gone to an island in the western sea and come back in one evening. All he had to show for it was Strength 12 and a smell of cow.
It was long past bedtime. The lamp was still lit in the Groats' kitchen, and Seth was at the table with his pipe, waiting. He looked up as Tam came in.
"Well?" said Seth.
"I fought some cows."
"Whose?"
"Nobody's," said Tam. "I promise."
Seth stared at him. Then, for the first time Tam could remember, Seth laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, as if it hadn't been used in a while.
"Wash," said Seth. "You stink."
Tam went out to the pump.
Next time, he thought. A full inventory of hides. Then Al Kharid, and the tanner.
He washed his hands three times. They still smelled of cow.