“Men shall die for this.”

  - Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane

  “I have seen the future and it is murder.”

  - C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

  “Talk to me.”

  Horacio Tell took a deep breath before speaking. He was putting a lot on the line.

  As a mere Producer Assistant, currently assigned to the Talent Scouting Department, he knew he was on thin ice. PAs didn’t stay in that position for very long. Your choices were, get promoted, or get the boot. And getting the boot meant going back to the life of a prole, a placid hell that only the dumbest and most unambitious humans could withstand without going hopelessly insane.

  And if I end up there, all I have to look forward to is sitting in front of a viewing crystal and getting my Mana and Essence sheared off like the rest of the sheep. Unless I want to try my luck at the Arenas. Yeah, no.

  “Okay,” he told the Vice-Assistant to the Vice-President of Programming before the cigar-chewing bastard got impatient and fired him right then and there. PAs were a dime a dozen at EPC (Eye of Ptah Corporation), and EPC Vice-Assistants, like all corpo-rats with a little taste of power, were a cruel bunch.

  “I think I’ve got a good candidate for a show,” Horacio announced with more confidence than he felt.

  “I’m listening,” the VAP to the VPP (Urth Durth of House Burth was his name) said, waving the cigar between his fingers like a conductor’s baton.

  “He’s in XXI-993. The new Crucible World. I think I found someone with headliner potential.”

  “I know the place,” the VAP to the VPP Urth said. “Tech world, no Mana until the System came in. So, who’s the hero?”

  “Roland Webb. He was Number One on the preliminary leaderboards for a whole three seconds before dropping out when he was betrayed and struck down from ambush.

  “He’s not dead, though. Primo fall from grace and climb back up story arc.”

  “Preliminary leaderboards?” Durth puffed on his cigar; the noxious hemp-tobacco-ice lotus mix filled the office with a thin fog that smelled of rage and quiet desperation. The leafy cigar blend cost more Essence than Horacio made in a year. “That doesn’t even count. Prelims, who cares? And the guy is already out? How do you get knocked off from the top spot that quickly?”

  “His enemies took him down just after he made it to the top.”

  “I’m going to assume you’ll explain why you think he can recover. And why you think he’s so special in the first place.”

  Horacio gulped.

  “He picked the Dual-Path,” he explained. “Classer-Cultivator; that’s the one Dual-Path available in his world.”

  “Classer-Cultivator. Okay, that’s not bad. Better than Classer-Super, but not as good as Super-Cultivator. Those flashy bastards get killer ratings.”

  VAP Durth liked Supers. The capes and the flashy costumes were made for show business. Until the caped bastards went off the rails and the System sent a team of Ascended to put them down like the mad dogs they’d become. At that point, viewers ragequit and latched on to a new hero.

  “So, anyways,” Horacio continued.

  “The guy went from a prelim Number Eight to Number Three in record time. Being in a time-diff Dungeon helped, of course. Dominated his tournament bracket. Won every match, then got a bunch of World Firsts. That pushed him to Number One.”

  “Okay, that’s pretty good,” Durth conceded in the tone of a guy who’s seen everything and is unlikely to be impressed by anything a lowly PA brought to him. “So, what happened to him?”

  “The System is obscuring the details, but someone destroyed his cultivation.”

  “Okay, a whodunit is good for extra spice, especially for the viewers with an IQ above room temperature. Twenty-five percent of the market, in case you forgot.”

  Durth puffed on his cigar and shook his head as he exhaled a cloud of narcotic fumes.

  “But if his cultivation is broken, the guy is done. That doesn’t work for a show. Didn’t last long enough to sell it as a rise-to-the-top and fall-from-grade arc.”

  “I don’t think he is done, though,” Horacio persisted.

  This was the tricky part; he could tell that Durth was about to dismiss him and his pitch.

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  Crucible Worlds churned out heroes and villains by the hundreds. It’d been that way ever since the Exemplar program had been instituted. By the same token, the Integration process killed most of them just as quickly as they appeared.

  Only a few diamonds in the rough lived long enough to deserve their own legend. Their own show.

  “Guy’s got a Bloodline,” he added as Durth puffed on his smoke stick. “And it’s a big one.”

  “Everybody and their brother’s got a Bloodline. Details.”

  “It’s still unknown.”

  “So, it could be a dud. What makes you think it’s a big one?”

  “Guy could freeze people with a stare before System Induction. In a zero-Mana world.”

  “That’s neat, kid. But I’m not gonna lie to you; I’ve seen better.”

  “There’s more. He’s got some kind of link with the Danse Macabre.”

  “Okay. That’s a Faction we don’t want to mess around with too much, but they will probably agree to sell us the rights to any non-confidential stuff we put on the show.”

  “And there is more.”

  “I’m still waiting for a hook.”

  “Death is the hook,” Horacio blurted out.

  “How so? There’s always a bunch of edgy kids picking Death as an Affinity, even when their percentage is crap.”

  “Yes, Mr. Durth. But...”

  “Mr. Durth was my father,” Urth interrupted him, sending a cold chill down his spine. “You call me Mr. Urth.”

  “I’m so sorry...”

  Was the stupid faux pas going to cost him the pitch? Or his life? Urth had a collection of shrunken heads, that previously belonged to salarymen who had crossed the VAP in some way. Corpo life was brutal and almost as deadly as Dungeon crawling. “I didn’t mean to...”

  “Never mind,” the VAP interrupted Horacio again; he was losing interest, Horacio realized with growing horror. He resisted the urge to touch his neck as he imagined having his head shrunk – Urth’s victims were usually alive when the process started.

  “But get to the point.”

  “His Death Affinity is not to a Concept. It’s to a Primal. His Bloodline is a Primal one.”

  Urth’s bored expression sharpened into cold, complete focus as he looked into Horacio’s eyes. “You aren’t kidding.”

  “No, sir, Mr. Urth. I ran an Essence analysis of some of the footage. On my dime, sir, EPC didn’t pay for it.”

  That analysis had eaten up most of Horacio’s savings, including his Winter Solstice bonus, and he still had to tap into his line of credit to afford the service.

  He’d bet everything he had on the hunch he had felt when he went over footage of a tournament fight and watched Roland conjure up an Image – a weak and short-lived one, but still an Image – at Tin 2 Rank. Which was beyond impossible.

  “What did the Analyst say?” Urth asked. “Exact words, kid. Don’t editorialize. I’ll be expecting a copy of the report if we go through with this.”

  Horacio nodded. “She found, and I quote ‘an Ancient Bloodline of Primal Origin, with an estimated purity of eighty-two percent, plus or minus ten percent. It’s the best she could do with the footage I showed her. All public domain,” he added hurriedly. “Nothing proprietary.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Kaynimi Noctos, D-Grade, level eighty-three. Independent contractor, licensed and bonded. Standard confidentiality Oaths.”

  “Good,” Urth said, putting out his cigar on a marble ashtray on his desk and making a mystical gesture with his hand. Horacio felt a set of formations and another set of runic wards come to life, isolating the office and ensuring no scrying or eavesdropping measures could access the discussion.

  “All right, kid – Horace, is it?”

  It was Horacio but he nodded anyway; it was close enough. The way the VAP to the VPP was acting scared him almost as much as the consequences of flubbing the pitch.

  “Primals are no joke, Horace,” Urth went on after he upgraded the office’s security. “If we greenlight a show with a Primal headliner, it’s not going to be just about the ratings and Essence harvest.

  “The heavy-hitters – major Factions, Pantheons, even the Ascended Masters – are going to perk up. I haven’t heard a peep about a Primal anything – Bloodline, Inheritor, what have you – showing up on XXI-993. You may have scooped not just other Media Corpos, even the newsie ones, but everybody else as well. This could be big.”

  “I see, Mr. Urth.”

  A scoop that big was above even Urth’s head. Urth would no doubt kick it upstairs to the VPP, who might kick it to the President of Production, a position so lofty that a Production Assistant was a flea on the back of an elephant by comparison.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do, kid,” Urth said. “What you’re gonna do.”

  Horacio nodded, then bowed in the salaryman gesture of utter submission.

  “We’re gonna keep this to ourselves for now,” the VAP went on.

  “This guy is still down and probably out. The safe bet is, he dies before he can tap into even a fraction of what he’s got. If that happens, we bundle the whole thing into a short two-, three-episode arc and dump it into Tragedies of the Infinite Universe. That’ll get us back eighty percent of our Essence budget so we don’t take too big of a loss.”

  TOTIU was the show where failed pilots went to die. Its ratings were mediocre even for non-live streams, and the show aired mostly in late night slots. Still, getting a producer assistant credit on TOTIU would improve Horacio’s standing incredibly.

  He had yet to see his name on any credit scrawl after three years on the job. This could be his break.

  “What I’m saying, Horace, is that I’m letting you run with this story. You’re getting a Lesser Pilot Co-Producer credit. No change in pay grade, but you get zero-point-three points of revenue if the network greenlights it.”

  “I won’t let you down, sir,” Horacio said breathlessly. Getting points on revenue – even the fraction of a point he was getting – was huge. Most Co-Producers got points on profits – and profits somehow never materialized, no matter how successful a show was.

  This was it. His big chance.

  “You’re getting a shoestring budget,” Urth warned him. “But put in an expense report for that Scryer you hired. You can bring her on as a consultant as long as she’s cheaper than doing analysis in-house.”

  “Yes, sir. She is cheaper, but she’s also very good.”

  “She better be. Get some background on this guy – Wu, was it?”

  “Webb.”

  “Sure, whatever. And do some digging about his Guide. She’s either very good or very lucky. Either way, we want her on our side.”

  Horacio already had, of course. “She’s under contract with Satori, Mr. Urth.”

  “Satori, eh? Oh, yeah, they are one of the Sponsors for XXI-993. I’ll send you the contact info for our liaison with them. Have our people talk to their people before you contact the Guide. And don’t show our hand. If they know they’ve got a potential Primal on their hands, they’ll lock him down tight.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. Paperwork’ll be on its way shortly. Keep my Ex-Ass in the loop.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Horacio said, standing up.

  Urth grunted and turned to one of his viewing crystals. The meeting was over, and the VAP to the VPP had dozens of other things to tend to.

  Horacio left the home office with a spring in his step, remembering to have a word with the VAP Executive Assistant on his way out.

  This is going to be huge. Huge!

  He had no idea.