The Wizardry Cursed

Forty-two: A NEW PLAYER

Judith was awake and sitting up in bed when Bronwyn and Moira came in.

"Hey Bronwyn, look at this." She held up her right arm, clenched a shaky fist and beamed. "Not bad, eh?"

Then she caught her visitors’ mood and sobered. "Is something wrong?"

"A great deal, I am afraid," Bronwyn told her.

Moira stepped up to the bed. "My Lady, you know that Wiz and the others were hiding in the halfway world to use a computer?"

Judith nodded, eyes wide.

"They were…" Moira stopped and took a deep, ragged breath. "They were discovered there and apparently overwhelmed."

"Oh shit!" Judith breathed. Her eyes began to fill with tears. "I’m really sorry, Moira."

Moira reached out and patted her hand. Then she gathered herself. "Our one chance now is to strike quickly against these other two wizards from your world, but we have no one who is expert with the new magic."

"You have me," Judith said quietly. "I may not be in Wiz’s league, but I helped write the compiler and I’m a pretty damn good programmer."

Moira sighed. "Thank you, my Lady. I had hoped you would say that."

"There is more," Bronwyn put in sharply. "Lady, before you can do anything, you must be further healed. The spells to do so are dangerous and could harm you."

Judith didn’t say anything.

"I know this is difficult," Moira said sympathetically. "Craig is your friend."

"Ex-friend," Judith said coldly. She looked up at Moira, her face white and her lips pressed into a bloodless line.

"Do you understand what he did to me?" she asked, her voice shaking. "He came to me when I was helpless and he used me! He pried things out of me I never intended to tell anyone. Then he took that information and he turned it against my friends." Her eyes glittered with a mixture of tears and rage.

"I feel like I’ve been raped. If there is anything I can do to get back at that son of a bitch, I’m for it."

"Even at the cost of your health?" Bronwyn asked sharply. "Understand Lady, this healing spell could leave you worse than you are now with no hope of recovery."

"I don’t care if it leaves me confined to a goddamn iron lung! If I can take that slimy little bastard down with me it will be worth it."

Bronwyn nodded and motioned Moira to one side.

"Well?" Moira demanded. "She is willing."

"She is blinded by anger," Bronwyn said coldly. "She is not thinking rationally." She held up a hand to cut off the protest. "But nevertheless I will do it."

It was the work of a few moments to prepare for the spell. Bronwyn summoned her two most senior assistants and they prepared the brazier and candles while the chief healer traced the warding circle about the bed.

Judith sat in the center of things and watched. "This isn’t the spell you used on Wiz, is it?" she asked.

Bronwyn finished the warding circle and looked up. "You are more seriously ill, Lady." She stepped back and regarded Judith carefully. "You may still withdraw."

"Not on your life."

Bronwyn nodded. One assistant reached into the sleeve of his robe and pulled out a packet of herbs which he threw on the brazier. As the fragrant smoke billowed up, Bronwyn and her other assistant raised their wands and began the chant. The first assistant joined in in a minor key. Judith’s eyes widened and her mouth formed a little "O" of surprise as the spell took effect. She lay back on the pillows and jerked spasmodically, her breath coming in short gasps. Moira caught her breath, but Bronwyn and her assistants continued the chant uninterrupted.

The chant soared, dropped and finally died away like the after note of a great bell. Judith twitched once more and lay still. The smoke dissipated and Bronwyn ritually defaced the circle before stepping to the bedside.

"Is she all right?" Moira demanded.

"Only time will tell that," the healer said.

"But the convulsions…"

"Nerves knitting together and forming new pathways. I have seen worse."

Judith’s eyes fluttered and she breathed in great wracking gasps. Moira reached to her, but Bronwyn placed a hand on her arm.

"Can you hear me, Lady?" the healer asked gently.

Judith opened her eyes and her mouth worked convulsively. "Wwww…" she gasped.

"Yes, Lady?"

"Wwwater," Judith forced out.

"Here, Lady," Bronwyn took a bowl from one of her assistants and held it to Judith’s lips. "Sip, now. Just sip." Judith slurped the liquid in the bowl, choked and spluttered.

Bronwyn removed the bowl. "That is enough for now," she said. Judith sank back against the pillow and breathed strongly and regularly. In a moment she was asleep and snoring gently. The healer nodded and motioned for them to withdraw. Already her assistants were carrying out the brazier, candles and other paraphernalia.

"She will probably sleep for a few hours," Bronwyn told Moira as they left the room. "We will know more when she awakens."

"Do you have any idea?"

"Well," the chief healer said judiciously, "she is not dead. That is something."

Moira couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the apartment she had shared with Wiz, so she went to her office off the programmers’ quarters. She hoped that work would help, but after she went over the same list of supplies three times without being able to remember what was what from the top to the bottom of the tablet, she gave up the idea of doing anything useful. Instead she contented herself with trying to file some of the stacks of wooden tablets and sheets of parchment that had accumulated on her desk while she was in the Bubble World. Vaguely she realized she would probably never be able to find half the material again, but she didn’t really care. At least it kept her from breaking down completely.

"Hi."

Moira looked up from her filing and saw Judith standing in the door of her office.

"Lady!" she whooped, knocking over a pile of files in her haste to get around the desk. "Are you all right?"

"Never better," Judith said as the hedge witch hugged her tight. "Hungry as hell, but I feel great and I don’t think I’ve weighed this little since I was sixteen." She stood back and patted her now-concave stomach. "Hell of a way to lose weight, though."

"I’m so glad."

"Bronwyn says I’m fine, so I thought I’d come and surprise you. Now let’s go get some dinner. I haven’t eaten in-oh-fifteen minutes." Her voice hardened. "And then we need a council of war."

In the event, the council was combined with dinner. For the first half-hour or so, Judith tore into a heaping selection of meats, fruits, bread and cheeses laid out on the table in Bal-Simba’s study while Moira, Bal-Simba and Arianne filled her in. Then as she started to dawdle over her food instead of wolfing it, she began to ask questions and contribute information.

"You say you have pictures of some of these robots Craig and Mikey have been producing?" she asked, polishing off another hunk of bread. "Can I see them?"

In response Arianne gestured at the tabletop and a miniature tableau sprang into existence among the bread crusts and fruit rinds. On a barren landscape of red hills and sand perhaps a dozen metal creations were locked in mortal combat.

"Well, what do you know?" Judith said wonderingly. "Warbots."

"You recognize them?" Bal-Simba asked.

"I’ll say. That’s a Murderer. That one’s a Red Terror. That thing over there is a Fer de Lance tank. And a couple of King Cobras. I don’t know what that one is, but it looks like a Preying Mantis with a couple of laser pods added."

She looked up from the display. "They’re game pieces. Imaginary fighting machines. Only it looks like the little shit’s made them real here."

"They are real enough, Lady," Arianne said.

Judith examined the display again. "I wish I had my rule books; then I could tell you exactly what they’re capable of. But I can remember enough to do pretty good without them."

"They look powerful," Juvian said dubiously.

Judith twisted her mouth to the side and rubbed her chin. "Well, yes and no. They’re sure nothing to mess with, but they have a lot of weaknesses."

Absently, she picked up a pear and bit into it.

"Look, I don’t know this Mikey, but I know Craig. I know how he thinks and I know how he fights." She wiped a dribble of juice off her chin and took another big bite.

"When you do a long campaign with someone you get to know them pretty well. Craig is not very original. That’s why we didn’t let him DM. He was too predictable."

"DM?" Juvian asked.

"Dungeon Master. The person who sets up the game. Anyway, Craig’s strictly a by-the-book player and he expects everyone else to be the same way." She stopped talking, demolished the remaining pear in three bites and wiped her chin before she went on.

"So maybe we can surprise them." She grinned nastily. "In fact, I know we can surprise them. And I have a few ideas on how."

"How long will it take you to-ah-arrange your surprises?" Bal-Simba asked.

"The longer the better, but I can have some stuff ready in a few days."

The black giant turned his attention to Moira. "And you said that Wiz believed we had at least two weeks?"

"So he said, Lord."

"Then we had best postpone our plans for an immediate attack. A few days will make us much stronger without appreciably strengthening our opponents, I think." He turned to Judith. "When can you begin?"

Judith took an apple out of the fruit bowl. "How does right now sound?"

In the event, it took a few hours longer than that to clear off her old desk in the Bull Pen and get started. It was after midnight when Malus and Juvian reported to her there.

"Moira tells me you’re pretty good with the spell compiler."

"We are hardly what you might call skilled, Lady," Juvian said. Malus stifled a yawn. He hadn’t been up this late in years.

"Okay, I want you to pick out the best of the apprentices and journeyman wizards. No, let that wait until morning. There are a couple of things I want you two to start on right away."

"You mean tonight?" Malus asked.

Judith smiled. "Get used to it. The time-expansion spell only works from sundown to dawn and we’re going to need all the time we can get."

The morning sun was streaming into the Bull Pen when Moira came calling. Juvian and Malus had dragged themselves off to bed some time before, but Judith was still hard at work.

"My Lady, Bal-Simba sent me to see if you are in need of anything."

"Just fine, thanks. But if you could have the kitchen send over some more food, I’d appreciate it."

"And a quantity of blackmoss tea. It is already being prepared."

Judith leaned back away from her desk and put her arms behind her head. "Bronwyn told me the healing spell would make me hungry, but I didn’t have any idea it would be like this."

"The healing process takes energy, Lady. The body must replenish itself."

"Anyway, I’m not tired and that’s useful. Look what we whipped up last night."

Over on the center table sat a vaguely familiar object. Except instead of being made of coiled straw basketwork it was made of shiny metal. The shape was different, too. As if two of them had been placed bottom to bottom. The result was something like a football, if a football had been two feet long and made of steel finished to look like coiled straw.

"Malus did the critical part of the spell," Judith explained as she reached down to the object and detached a tinier thing. This she held up for Moira’s inspection.

It was a shiny piece of metal no bigger than the first joint of Moira’s finger. She looked closely and realized it was a perfectly formed metal insect, a bee to be precise. She became aware of a muted buzzing coming from inside the larger thing, as if it was full of thousands of steel bees.

"They’ll ignore you unless you’re moving fast," Judith explained. "But they home in on anything going faster than about 800 feet per second and destroy it."

Moira handed the robot bee back to Judith. "That is clever, but I am not sure I see the purpose."

"That’s because you don’t know our weapons. The most common ones are guns that shoot pieces of metal at very high speeds."

"Wiz told me about those. He said they were very destructive."

"They are. And they’re going to be one of Craig’s prime weapons. But our little killer bees can destroy bullets and shells before they can hit anything. So when we attack, we saturate the area with a bunch of these beehive rounds."

"But that thing is not round," Moira said. Then she looked narrowly at Judith. "Or does it approach roundness for sufficiently large values?"

Judith looked blank. "I don’t understand."

"Neither do I," Moira sighed. "It was something Jerry said."

She stopped and for an instant Judith thought she was going to cry. But instead she said, "If there is nothing more you need I will leave you to your work."

Judith leaned forward to her desk again. "You know," she said absently, "I’ve worked on mission-critical software before. But this is the first time I’ve had the whole world on my shoulders."

"How does it feel?"

Judith gave her a tight little smile. "I don’t like it." She sighed and turned back to Moira. "People are going to get killed in this, aren’t they? Probably a lot of people."

Moira nodded gravely. "This troubles you?"

"Yeah. A lot. Before when I’ve fought a campaign it’s been a game. At the end you picked your pieces up and put them back in the box until next time. Here there won’t be any next time and I’m sending people to their deaths on the strength of my bright ideas."

"They will go with or without you, Lady," Moira told her. "The best you can do for them is to give them the tools so they may win."

Judith grimaced as if she was tasting something sour. "Yeah, but that doesn’t make it easier."

"I am told that it never is easy, Lady."

"Lady, this is fantastic," Bal-Simba said as he looked over the plans. "I am astonished that you have accomplished so much in so little time."

Judith shrugged. "Mostly it wasn’t any harder than hacking out some simple BASIC subroutines. Besides, I had Malus, Juvian and some of the apprentices to help me."

"Still, I remember how long it took a dozen of you to produce what we needed the last time you were our guest."

"That’s why it took so long. What we did then laid the groundwork for what I’m doing now." She smiled. "The secret of good programming is that you spend ninety percent of your time up front building tools and maybe ten percent on the actual job-plus the other ninety percent of the time it takes to debug everything, of course. Unlike most of the people I’ve worked for, you were smart enough to stand back and let us spend the time on the tools. So now…" again the shrug, "it’s easy."

"You said you also wanted to discuss strategy. My guard commander tells me your suggestions are, um, somewhat unorthodox."

Judith smiled. "I’ll bet he did."

"Well, he did put the matter-ah-somewhat more strongly."

"I can understand that. But I know Craig and Craig’s a gamer."

Judith rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward. "Look, one of the problems most gamers have is they spend too much time worrying about hardware and not enough on C3-command, control and communications. If I know Craig, he’s got some horrendously effective hardware. But he’s weak on the things that will let him use it effectively.

"Now," she went on judiciously, "we could try to match him on the hardware. But we really can’t because he’s had longer to play with this stuff and he has control of the Bubble World. So mostly we won’t bother. Instead we’ll use pretty much the weapons and tactics your people already know-plus the new magic-and we’ll primarily use technology to enhance the C3. We may not be as powerful as he is, but we’ll be better coordinated."

Bal-Simba grinned. "Excellent, Lady." Then the grin faded. "But you have laid your plans in terms of only one of our enemies, this Craig. What about the other one? The one called Mikey?"

Judith’s frown matched the wizard’s. "I don’t know. So far we haven’t seen anything that isn’t in Craig’s style. Either Mikey is just like Craig or he’s up to something that hasn’t shown up yet."

"Ah," said the wizard Malus, "you sent for me, my Lord."

Bal-Simba looked up from his desk and eyed his tubby little colleague.

"My Lord," he inquired pleasantly, "have you ever flown on a dragon?"

Malus blinked. "A dragon, my Lord?"

"Yes. Have you ever flown on one?"

"Why, ah, no. No I haven’t. That is…"

"We need wizards with the dragon cavalry in the attack. You are among the best qualified of the Mighty for the job." Bal-Simba forbore to mention that Malus’s main qualification was his weight. In spite of his girth, he was the lightest of all the Mighty-save for Juvian, who suffered from an airsickness no spell could cure.

Malus half-bowed, torn between honor and trepidation. "Well, thank you, my Lord, but I mean, after all, a wizard on dragonback…"

"It is voluntary, of course," Bal-Simba said blandly.

"Oh naturally I volunteer, but, ah, wouldn’t a levitation spell work just as well?"

"Dragons do not like to have other flying things near them when they are on the wing. Especially not something so unnatural as a flying wizard."

Malus deflated like a cold souffle. "Oh."

Bal-Simba beamed and clapped the smaller man on the shoulder. "Excellent. Now, report to the Master of Dragons in the main aerie. He will see to your training as a dragon rider. Later the Lady Judith will brief you on tactics and teach you the new spells you will need."

As the pudgy wizard bowed and turned toward the door he remembered that he was deathly afraid of heights.

Judith pushed a strand of dark hair out of her face as she bent over the map again. Her lower back ached from the time she had spent standing like this and she was hoarse from talking all morning, but at last the plan seemed to be coming together.

"Okay, that leaves the communications relay here." She stabbed her finger down on the three-dimensional map that occupied the whole table top. "If we lose that we lose most of our ability to coordinate between the attacking force and the Capital."

Moira checked her stack of wooden tablets. "We have an entire squadron of dragons assigned to protect it. They carry your new weapons. The squadron leader is waiting outside should you wish to meet her."

Judith stood up from the map and stretched to try to get the kinks out of her back. "Yeah. There are a couple of things we need to go over." And it’ll give me an excuse to sit down. She was still studying the map when she heard the door open.

"Reporting as ordered, my Ladies."

Judith looked up at the sound of the voice and gaped.

The squadron leader was a fresh-faced brunette with a fine dusting of freckles and one of those complexions that no one over the age of twenty can ever have.

"Have they explained your mission to you?" Moira asked, apparently oblivious of the effect the squadron leader was having on Judith.

"Yes, Lady. We have been running training exercises every day for as long as our dragons can fly."

"And the weapons?"

The dragon rider grinned. "Amazing, Lady. The dragons do not like them, but…" She shrugged.

"Okay," Judith put in. "Remember those things are most effective against metal-robots or flying machines. Don’t use them against biologicals unless you have to. Also keep in mind there is a maximum and a minimum range. Also, the closer they get before you shoot the better your chances of hitting, but the fewer shots you can get off before they are too close."

"We have been practicing these things, Lady."

"Good. Now if we’re lucky they won’t detect the communications platform at all and you won’t have to fight." The expression that flashed across the squadron leader’s face showed she wouldn’t consider that lucky at all. "If you do have to fight, you’ll probably be in-ah-a target-rich environment. Keep in mind your job is to protect the relay, not shoot down attackers."

The girl nodded gravely. "I understand, Lady."

"Okay. Anything else? Then you’re dismissed. I’ll try to talk to you later about last minute details."

The squadron leader bowed and closed the door gently behind her as she left.

"Our apprentice squadron," Moira explained as Judith scowled at the closed door.

"Hell, she can’t be more than fourteen!"

"Closer to sixteen summers."

"A goddamn kid!"

"What would you? The alternative is to send them into the thick of the battle. Besides, young riders and dragons are adaptable in ways that older ones are not. Believe me, my Lady, if they must use those weapons of yours, the dragons had better be the most adaptable ones we have."