The Wizardry Cursed

Forty-five: BATTLE ROYAL

"Dragon Leader, you have an allied force approaching to your right. I say again, you have friendlies approaching from widdershins high."

What the… ? There were no more friendly forces. Save for a couple of squadrons on guard duty Dragon Leader had the entire cavalry of the North with him. Anything else in the air had to be hostile.

"Dragons at widdershins high," the scout on the right flank sang out.

"Can you identify?" Dragon Leader barked into his communications crystal. He hated surprises in the middle of a battle.

Silence.

"I say again, can you identify the dragons?"

"Uhhh…"

"Dammit, speak up!"

By now the formations were at almost the same level and closing fast as the newcomers pulled into a shallow dive.

Dragon Leader craned his neck to see the approaching force. Whoever they were, they had the most ragged-ass formation he had ever seen. They looked more like a flight of geese than a squadron of cavalry.

Dragon Leader’s mount bridled and nearly bucked as the flight approached. It took a moment to bring the animal under control and when Dragon Leader looked up again the leader of the new force was flying next to him.

Dragon Leader glanced. Then he gaped. Then he nearly fell out of his saddle. Flying beside him was the biggest dragon he had ever seen in his life.

This was no adolescent cavalry mount. It was a full-grown, fully intelligent dragon and a monster of its kind at that. It was easily twice the length of his own mount and might have reached 200 feet. Behind and above came dozens more wild dragons.

A great golden eye regarded Dragon Leader and his dragon with amused contempt. Then with a flick of its tail, the giant reptile winged over and dived for the deck. The rest of the wild dragons followed their leader down.

Dragon Leader licked lips suddenly gone dry. "Uh, central," he croaked into his communications crystal. "The allied forces have taken the lead position and are going in low."

"Allies lead and low," the controller’s voice came back. "Acknowledged."

Fortuna, Dragon Leader thought, what have we gotten ourselves into?

Out on the edge of the plain the warbots waited. There were 100-ton Murderers, 30-ton Hellfires, Skysweeper anti-aircraft units, a couple of 200-ton Gargantua fire support models and a dozen or so Springer scouts, all in a loose grouping just behind the military crest of the ridge. They were being held as a mobile reserve, ready to sweep down off the ridge and deal any attacker on the plain a crushing blow to the flank.

The Springer nearest the crest of the ridge turned its head. Its sensors had picked up something…

With a rush the lead dragon swept over the hill scant feet off the ground. A blast of dragon fire destroyed the first robot before it could even face its foe.

The second warbot had time to half raise its laser before the hurtling mass slammed it to the ground. The warbot next to it had only half turned when the massive tail caught it in its midsection and sent it sprawling.

By now the engagement was general as a dozen more dragons topped the ridge and piled into their metal enemies. Laser blasts and gouts of dragon fire lanced through the air and parts of robots and pieces of dragon bodies flew in every direction.

Then there were no more robots. Seven of the dragons lay motionless amidst the carnage and one dragged a wing.

As one, the unharmed dragons galloped forward and took to the air again. The one with the broken wing followed on foot.

Without warning clumps of guardsmen and wizards popped up all over the plain. Immediately they spread out into long, loose lines and started moving toward the castle.

Kenneth, at the head of his group, squinted at what lay ahead. Fortuna, what a mess! he thought. The wizards had been able to bring them no closer than a league to the castle because of interfering magic. They would have to cross the distance on foot, possibly under fire and almost certainly against enemies.

Kenneth felt especially naked without comrades at either shoulder. But they had been warned that concentrations which gave defense against sword and spear would only serve as targets for the weapons of these foreign sorcerers.

Well in front of the attacking forces a half dozen football-shaped metal containers popped into existence and split open on the red sand. A dark cloud poured out of each of them and dissipated in the air.

That was the signal. Kenneth raised his arm and motioned his men to move forward.

I wish I had a drink, he thought.

"Mikey! Mikey!" Craig beat on the door frantically. Finally it opened a crack.

"Yeah?"

"Why the hell didn’t you answer the net? I’ve been calling you for fifteen minutes."

"I told you. If you have business with me, you come to me. I’m not answering your goddamn pager." The door started to swing shut.

"Goddamnit, we’re being attacked!" Craig yelled. "We’ve got dragons and infantry and shit all over the place."

The door swung open and there was Mikey wearing only a pair of pants. In the back of his mind Craig realized he looked terrible, all thin and sort of stretched out. He moved like a speed freak, all jerky, uncontrolled energy. There was a predatory gleam in his eye that Craig didn’t remember seeing before.

"Yeah?" Mikey said. Then he paused as if listening to something that only he could hear.

"Come on, man! I need all the help I can get."

"You keep them busy. I’ve got something to set up."

Craig nodded and raced for his command center.

"We have isolated their control links," one of the Watchers called out to the group on the dais.

"Transfer the characteristics to my station," Judith called back. Instantly the Emac sitting cross-legged in front of her began to write in the air.

Judith smiled tightly. "Time to jam." She turned to the Emac.

"backslash"

"?" the Emac responded.

"blackwatch exe"

The Emac gabbled and several dozen demons appeared on the table. They were fashioned like men but each wore a skirt and shawl of dark green patterned with black. Several had drums and the rest had odd contrivances with several shiny black tubes extending over their shoulders. The leader carried a silver-tipped staff near as tall as he was and wore an enormous hat made of some black fur.

"Give them ’The Black Bear,’ " Judith commanded. "Then ’Scotland the Brave,’ ’The Highland Brigade at Maggersfontein,’ ’The Southdown Militia,’ ’The Earl of Mansfield’ and ’Lord Lovett Over The Rhine.’ After that use your imagination."

The tiny drum major nodded, turned to the demons behind him and raised his staff. The pipers inhaled as one, the drummer struck the beat and the skirl of the pipes reverberated off the stone walls.

"Let’s see them even think through that," she said viciously.

"I hope it is as effective on the enemy as it is on us," Bal-Simba boomed over the noise.

Judith looked up and realized everyone in the command center had stopped work and was staring at the table. Several of them had clapped their hands over their ears. Judith made a gesture and the sound died to a whisper.

"Sorry Lord, I keep forgetting it’s an acquired taste."

By the time Malus’s dragon approached the castle the fat little wizard was half-seasick and thoroughly miserable. Normally a dragon could not carry two people for very long. But the wizards had added their magic to the animal’s natural flying ability so they were able to keep up with the other dragons.

Not that it was much comfort to Malus. He was strapped into a second saddle back on the dragon’s shoulders. The beast was too wide to straddle comfortably at that point and the insides of his thighs ached terribly. Although the straps holding him to the saddle were secure, the saddle itself had a tendency to shift alarmingly whenever the dragon maneuvered suddenly. For Malus’s taste there had been far too many sudden maneuvers. The blue robe of the Mighty, which was so impressive on the ground, was totally unsuited for dragon riding. The wind tugged at the hem and tended to flip it back above his knees. The cold air whipped up the robe and around his legs. Probably the only part of him that was still warm was his seat, which was protected by the saddle. But he couldn’t tell for sure because it had gone to sleep long since.

He tried to shut out the discomfort by concentrating on the back of the rider and not looking down. Above all, he didn’t want to look down.

The castle erupted in flame and smoke as every weapon fired on the attackers. Artillery and mortars of every description fired and fired again as fast as the automatic loaders could feed them. Streams of tracers fountained up into the sky as anti-aircraft batteries sought their targets. Lines of laser light swept back and forth over the plain and sky.

Between the killer bees and the messed-up control system in the southern quadrant it wasn’t nearly as effective as it should have been. What ought to have been annihilating was merely deadly. Men went down like tenpins and dragons fell from the sky under the impact, but still the others pressed on.

From ground and air the attackers returned fire. Lightning bolts and fireballs flew from the wizards’ fingers destroying emplacements and blinding sensors. Then two squadrons of dragons peeled off and let fly with heat-seeking missiles. The missiles went for the hottest things in the castle, which were the barrels of the artillery and the firing tubes of the lasers. A series of explosions blossomed on the castle walls and here and there the secondary explosion of a magazine made a section of castle wall bulge outward and slump.

Still the attackers came on.

Circling above the battle Malus groped in the sleeve of his robe and brought out a crystal sphere just large enough to fit comfortably in the palm of his hand. It was held in a net that was tied to his wrist so he would not lose it and the netting made it harder than normal to concentrate. Still the picture was clear enough.

Peering into the crystal he saw that there were a number of other things in the air, but little enough magic.

Fumbling in his other sleeve he produced a light hazel wand. It wasn’t as powerful or as impressive as his normal staff, but it was much easier to handle on dragon back. He kept his eyes fixed on the crystal as he raised his arm above his head and began to chant.

Craig’s screen started to fill with magically generated hash. He quickly applied a filter function to the image and some of the interference faded, but what was left pulsed rhythmically and seemed to beat against itself like a badly tuned instrument, creating irregular patches of dark and light on his screen.

The magical sensors were worse. The screen filled with glowing blobs of amorphous color that made it look like a neon lava light. Craig swore under his breath and started combining the output of various kinds of sensors and tinkering with filters until he got his best picture.

Vaguely Craig realized he hadn’t been smart in setting this system up. Everything flowed back to his command center, but he could only concentrate on a few facets of the battle at one time. There was too much happening for him to coordinate the defense. He would have to rely on the sensors and programming built into his warbots and other weapons. Which was fine, only there was no way for those weapons to coordinate without direct orders from his command center.

Still, he had a lot of weapons.

"What’s going on up there?" Gilligan demanded.

Karin shaded her eyes and squinted. "I cannot see. No, wait! Those are dragons. Ridden dragons and they are attacking." She looked at Gilligan. "Those are my people."

"Can we signal them?"

"They are too high and too fully engaged." She picked up her bow and started back toward the castle. "Come on. We must help them."

"How?"

She looked over her shoulder. "We will think of something, now come if you are coming." She trotted off with Stigi humping along beside her. Gilligan had to run to catch up.

Thorfin looked at his leader’s boot soles and scowled. It seemed as if they had been climbing for hours. First up the steep outer wall, then in through a gun port and finally up through the castle’s ventilation ducts. There was plenty of room, but the wind was almost strong enough to pluck a dwarf from the wall and every few hundred yards they had to unfasten a grating that blocked the duct. Twice they had narrowly avoided the whirling blades of huge ventilation fans that threatened to turn the whole expedition into dwarf tartare. And still they climbed onward. Glandurg stopped every few minutes to check his locating talisman, but it always told them the Sparrow was above them.

I never realized glory was such hard work, Thorfin thought as Glandurg missed a foothold and kicked him in the face.

"Look," said Jerry. "Do you have any idea where we are?"

The four of them were standing at the crossing of four identical corridors. There were no floor numbers, room numbers or anything else to give them a clue.

"One of the upper floors of the castle," Wiz told him.

"In other words we’re lost, right?"

"No, I know where we are. I just don’t know where the computer is."

Jerry growled. "Okay, let’s do this systematically. Lannach says the computer is in the room where you met Craig and Mikey, right?" Wiz nodded. "We know the room has an outside wall because it had a big window, right?" Again the nod.

"So let’s go to the outside wall, put our left hands against it and follow it around, checking every door as we go. Eventually we’ve got to find the right room."

"There are hundreds of rooms on this floor," Danny protested.

"All the more reason we need a system."

"Okay," Wiz said. "There’s the outside wall. Let’s do it."

All four of them put their left hands on the wall and started walking single file. The first room they came to was empty. The second held a mass of machinery that was obviously not the computer.

"This looks more like it," said Wiz as they came to the third door. It was wider than the others and almost as high as the corridor.

Wiz opened the door and looked inside. Ranked along the walls in the dark were a dozen heavily armed robots, all motionless. Suddenly the lights came on, the robots jerked erect and a dozen metal heads swiveled toward the door.

The programmers didn’t wait for the rest. Wiz threw fireballs, Danny threw lightning bolts and Jerry hit them with some kind of spell that made them crumble to powder. A couple of laser beams flashed over their heads and left burning furrows in the wall behind them. The heat activated the fire sprinklers, drenching all four of them with water.

June looked up at the rain magically coming from the ceiling and laughed at the wonder of it all. Wiz choked on the smell of fried, electrocuted, powdered robot and shook his head to get the water out of his eyes.

He glared up at Jerry. "You and your system."

"There’s nothing wrong with the system. It’s just that if you follow it you are certain to find everything on this floor."

"Most of which we don’t want to find. Okay, we’ll keep following the wall, but from now on we don’t open any doors unless they look really promising."

Karin stopped so quickly Mick almost ran into her. She turned, put her finger to her lips and gestured around the corner. Cautiously Mick peeked around. There was a door there, set at the end of a narrow corridor back into the wall. There were also six things out of someone’s nightmare guarding it. They were big, ugly, armored, and armed to the teeth.

He ducked back and looked at Karin. Go the other way? he pantomimed and Karin nodded.

Just then Stigi decided to see what was so interesting. He stuck out his neck, thrust his head fully around the corner and snorted in curiosity.

With a wild yell the guards charged forward.

"Shit," Gilligan said, fumbling for his shoulder holster. Before Karin could draw her bow, he stepped around the corner, dropped to a semi-crouch and fired two-handed.

Eight shots rang out in the confined space and all six of the guards were down.

Karin’s eyes widened at the sight.

"Well done," she said. "Now, shall we use the door they were guarding?"

At that moment the door flew open and a solid mass of the manlike monsters charged out waving swords, spears and other less identifiable, more nasty, weapons.

Instinctively Gilligan dropped into his shooters’ stance, but Karin grabbed his arm and pulled him down.

With a whoosh and a roar Stigi let go with a blast of flame.

The effect on the packed mass was instant and appalling. The things shriveled, screamed, burst into flame, and died in the ranks.

Again the whoosh and another lance of dragon fire struck the remaining attackers. Black smoke boiled off charred flesh and the stink was appalling. Here and there came a series of explosions as ammunition in guards’ bandoleers ignited.

And then there were no more attackers. Gilligan looked at the blackened mass in front of him and was almost sick. He’d seen people burned to death in air crashes before, but not on this scale. Karin had gone deathly pale under the layer of reddish dust.

"Let’s get inside," he said. Carefully they picked their way through the grisly remains, trying to touch as little as possible.

"My God," Gilligan breathed, "will you look at this place?"

The room was enormous. The ceiling was at least a hundred feet above them and it stretched out proportionally in all directions. In the center of the brightly lit area were half a dozen huge robots in various stages of construction with smaller robots swarming over them like worker ants. As they watched a traveling crane maneuvered a torso section over the legs and hips of one of the robots.

"It’s a factory," he said, awed.

None of the robots paid the least heed to their unexpected visitors. They kept right on working.

Gilligan motioned and led Karin and Stigi along the wall and around the assembly area.

"There’s got to be another way out of here. No way those robots could get through the door we just came through."

They were halfway around the room when another giant robot stepped out of the shadows behind them.

Karin screamed, Stigi whirled, inhaled and spouted a gout of flame. The robot stepped forward inexorably and raised its laser arm.

Craig had designed the robot with a magic power source, a magically reinforced body and magic sensors and control links. But the design was essentially technological. He hadn’t considered what might happen if his creation stepped in front of a giant flame thrower.

The robot’s first bolt went wild into the ceiling, knocking hot rock down on the three and burning a red afterimage in Mick’s vision. Then the chips in the control circuits overheated and failed. The robot pinwheeled its arms wildly and its glittering torso twisted from right to left and back again. Then the seals in the hydraulic cylinders in its legs and hips failed from the heat and contact with the boiling hydraulic fluid. The thing lost hydraulic power in a gush of robotic incontinence, tottered and fell face-first into a puddle of smoking hydraulic fluid. The floor shook, but the robot workers paid no attention.

Stigi stalked forward and sniffed disdainfully at his kill. Then he stepped daintily around the puddle-or as daintily as you can when you’re eighty feet long and in a confined space-and continued on his way.

The main door out of the assembly area was on the same scale as the rest of the factory. Fortunately it was also open.

"Now, where do we go from here?"

"Up I would think," Karin said. "Their commanders would want to be as high as possible to see as much as they could."

Gilligan didn’t bother to point out to her that it didn’t work that way when you had radar and advanced sensors.

"Think we can get Stigi upstairs?" he asked.

"Oh yes, Stigi is not afraid of heights." She frowned. "Though this place is so tall it may take us hours to reach the top."

Remembering how high the fortress looked from the outside Gilligan thought that was a wild underestimate.

Then he caught sight of something. "Wait a minute, we may not have to walk. Look at this."

Set in the far wall was a freight elevator big enough to take a semi. "They must use this to move robots. If it will carry one of them it will sure hold Stigi."

It took a little doing to get the dragon into the elevator. If Stigi wasn’t afraid of heights, he wasn’t very fond of confined spaces and to him an elevator big enough to move the Space Shuttle was still a confined space. He started alarmingly when the elevator began to move and for a moment Gilligan was afraid he was going to crush them both. But Karin stood by his head, stroking him and telling him what a good dragon he was.

Stigi calmed down but every so often he would glare over at Gilligan in a way that said he understood perfectly well Mick was to blame for all this and some day he would get even.

The elevator lurched to a stop and the doors opened. "End of the line," Gilligan said.

He drew his pistol and peered out. They seemed to be in some sort of service area. The floors were bare concrete and the light fixtures were Spartan. Scattered about were a number of pieces of equipment Gilligan didn’t recognize and a thing like a metal octopus that was obviously a cleaning robot of some kind. At least it had a floor buffer built into its base.

As Craig studied his screen, a new symbol sprang up at the very bottom. One of his scouts had located the attacker’s main communications relay.

"Get that relay," Craig screamed into the screen. On the periphery of the battle a demi-wing of two squadrons wheeled and raced to do his bidding.

"Shield flight, you have sixteen enemy incoming. I say again, sixteen incoming."

"Understood. Sixteen incoming," Elke repeated into her communications crystal.

There were only five other dragons and riders at her back.

What was it the strange sorceress had called this? A "target-rich environment." To hell with that. She called it being plain old-fashioned outnumbered.

She signaled her command and the dragons wheeled and spread out into the attack formation they had practiced so many times at the Capital. Off in a far corner of her mind Elke realized she wasn’t frightened, just terribly, terribly busy.

The fighters came in hugging the ground to escape radar detection, but that did nothing to shield them from magic. Elke and the Watcher both saw them coming.

Almost directly beneath their quarry the flight of metal shapes arrowed upward, jets thundering as they climbed toward their target.

Far above them Elke winged her dragon over into a steep dive. Out of the corners of her eyes she saw the dragons to her left and right fold their wings back and follow her down.

Her instructors might not have approved. The formation was loose and dragons were slowed by the objects they grasped in their talons. But it was closing with the enemy and that was all that mattered.

The targeting spell for the new weapons she carried began to sing. Before her eyes lines of glowing green merged into cross hairs and rectangle of her target sight. She kept staring intently at the specks below her, moving her head slightly to center them in the crosshairs, listening intently all the while. Then the squadron leader heard the bone-quivering hum in her ear that told her the weapon had locked on. She reached out and touched a stud on her saddle.

A trail of smoke sprang from the box in the dragon’s claw as the air-to-air missile leaped free of its launcher. Beside and behind her other trails of dirty gray smoke streaked the sky as the rest of her flight fired.

The squadron leader eased back on the reins and hauled her dragon around into a tight spiraling turn. Below her fourteen missiles raced toward their targets. In spite of their magical components, the guidance systems were essentially technological. They looked for the brightest radar returns in the sky. Dragons and the relay they were guarding returned only small echoes but the climbing fighters stood out sharply.

The fighters were hardly sitting ducks. Their radar sensors picked up the missiles as soon as they launched and the attackers broke and jinked all over the sky in an effort to break the radar locks, scattering flares and packets of chaff behind them.

For half of the fighters it was enough. Eight of their companions exploded in balls of black and orange as the missiles found them but the others continued to climb toward the relay demon.

Elke counted the explosions and nodded to herself. Well, they’d been warned that some might get through. But the survivors had lost momentum. That gave her squadron opening enough.

Again she led her dragons into a screaming dive into the midst of the attackers.

The fighters filled the air with ECM, flares dropped free with magnesium radiance that briefly outshone the sun and chaff bloomed everywhere around them.

None of which mattered in the slightest. Dragons, even missile-armed dragons, don’t carry radar and the forces were too close for missiles. Now the defenders relied on the traditional weapons of the dragon cavalry. Bursts of dragon fire ripped at the metal shapes. Then the great bows sang and iron arrows leaped toward their targets. Planes cartwheeled across the sky or dropped like stones as flames and death arrows found their marks.

One lone fighter pulled away from the melee, climbing toward the relay station. Elke lined her dragon up on the metal enemy and touched the second stud on her saddle. Again smoke streaked from the dragon’s claws as a second missile sprang free. But there was no pulse of radar energy to warn the aircraft. Instead Elke held the missile on course by manipulating the stud with her thumb, always keeping it centered in the glowing orange rectangle. The missile traveled up the plane’s tailpipe and blew it out of the sky before the aircraft or its controllers even knew it was there.

In his castle, Craig cursed and pounded his fist on the table. But he had other things to command his attention.

Well, it wasn’t the first time he had lost heavily in the early moves and gone on to win the campaign. The enemy couldn’t do jack shit unless they could penetrate his fortress. They hadn’t hit his outworks yet. When they did things would be different.

Vaguely he wondered where the hell Mikey was and what he was doing.

The wind whistled and whipped like knives of ice around the high, dark spire where Mikey stood. He could sense rather than see the formless shapes that pulsated and moved in the freezing distance beneath his feet.

A single wan pool of yellow light illuminated his workbench. For the last time he checked the spell before him.

It was a complex shape about the size of his head and so dark as to be beyond black.

Mikey caressed the thing, oblivious to its piercing chill. At last it was ready.

We are prepared. The voice pulsed in his ears like his own blood. We wait.

With a gesture Mikey killed the light on the workbench. Then he clasped the sphere to him and started down from his high place.

The guardsmen and wizards advanced in loose order over the barren ground.

Actually, Donal thought, "loose order" was a misnomer. A "swarm of gaggles" was more like it.

But this was the formation they had been advised to use. Having seen pictures of their likely opponents Donal was all for it. Absently he reached back and touched the tube slung across his back. He hoped it was as good as advertised.

So far they had met no real opposition on the ground. The shelling had died down to a background rumble. Once a cluster of gray metal things swooped down on them with fire and explosions. But between their wizards’ lightning bolts and the timely intervention of a wing of dragons there had been very little damage done.

Up ahead a door opened in the castle wall and several things shaped like men stepped out.

Either we’re a hundred paces from the castle, Donal thought, or those things are giants. He signaled his squad to spread out and take cover. Seemingly oblivious to the oncoming metal giants, the guardsmen responded as they had been drilled.

A lance of fire slashed into the earth so close to him he could smell the ozone stink. Behind him bullets beat a tattoo into the dirt. Donal jammed the point of his sword into the ground and brought the dull green tube slung across his back around and over his shoulder. As methodically as he had been taught he flipped up the sights and lined them up on the giant robot.

The tube bobbed up and down as he followed his target and then he squeezed the trigger. The tube bucked slightly and Donal dropped and rolled just before another blast of laser energy rent the place where he had been standing.

When he looked up the robot was swaying uncertainly, its right knee a smoking ruin. Before he could get to his hands and knees two more explosions blossomed on the giant torso. It swayed forward once more and then toppled like a felled tree.

In his tower Craig swore viciously. His warbots were programmed to fight other warbots or dragons, not infantry with anti-tank missiles. He’d have to override and run this action himself. He slapped a button on his console, but nothing happened.

"Get me a control link!" he yelled into his microphone.

"We are trying, dread master," came a voice in his ear, "but there is something wrong in the transmitter."

"Then switch to the alternate," Craig yelled.

"That was the alternate," the voice said. "Maintenance estimates it will have the primary repaired in three point oh eight minutes."

"Shit!" Craig slumped back in his chair. This was like playing on a night when you couldn’t make a saving roll for love or money. Well, three minutes wouldn’t make that much difference in that part of the battle and there were plenty of other places he could put his time.

Meanwhile, was it his imagination or did he hear a high-pitched sound coming from his display console-a sound like a very small giggle?

"My palm’s sore," Danny complained.

"Well, don’t drag it along the wall," Jerry told him. "I didn’t mean that literally anyway."

Even investigating only the likely looking doors it seemed that it was taking forever to check out the rooms. Even this high up the castle was much bigger than Wiz had imagined.

The next set of doors didn’t look like anything Wiz remembered, but they were big and probably important. He was just about to punch the button when they slid open and he found himself face-to-face with a dirty, unshaven man in a tattered flight suit waving a pistol. Over the man’s shoulder Wiz could see an equally dirty and disheveled woman and a large dragon.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.

"Major Michael Gilligan, United States Air Force. Who the hell are you?"

"This is the Sparrow," Karin put in, stepping forward. "He is the mighty wizard I told you of." She sketched a curtsey. "Well met, my Lord."

"What are you doing here?"

"Raising hell," Gilligan told him.

"My Lords, the League is attacking the castle," Karin said breathlessly.

"I know. Look, can you get a message back to the Capital? They need to know we’re alive."

Karin’s face fell. "Alas, my Lord, the enemy is jamming our communications."

"Damn," Wiz said, entirely without heat. "All right. We’re searching this floor for a computer these guys are using to cook up something really nasty. Can you help us?"

"Of course, my Lord." Karin bobbed another curtsey.

"Okay by me," Gilligan said. "You really from the USA?"

"Cupertino," Wiz shrugged. "It’s pretty much the same thing."

"Hot damn!" Danny said, looking up at Stigi. "Firepower!"

"You might say that," Gilligan said, thinking of the pile of charred bodies by the gate.

"Come on then, and keep your eyes peeled. We’ve run into all sorts of things."

A couple of hundred more yards and two more uninteresting rooms and they came to a broad cross corridor that was carpeted in a different color and more richly finished than any they had seen so far.

"I recognize this!" Wiz said. "This is the way to the computer room."

"Great!" said Danny as he stepped in front of Wiz and out into the center of the corridor. "Let’s go…"

A bolt of green radiance lashed down the corridor and caught Danny square in the back. He pitched forward and dropped like a sack of sand. June screamed and rushed toward him, heedless of the bolts of energy crackling around her.

Down the corridor came a packed mass of goblin troops, the ones in front firing ray guns.

Gilligan stepped forward, dropped to one knee and braced the pistol in both hands, elbow resting on knee. Three well-placed shots dropped the leaders and the rest hesitated for a moment.

Then Wiz started throwing fireballs.

"Stigi," Karin’s voice rose over the noise. "Forward."

Stepping past June kneeling over Danny, the dragon shouldered Gilligan and Wiz out of the way and advanced down the corridor. The guards reformed and came on, energy bolts scoring the walls ahead. If any of them hit Stigi he didn’t show it. Instead he breathed deeply and sent a gout of flame washing down the corridor.

That was the final straw. The attacking guards broke and ran.

Wiz bent over Danny, but June bared her teeth and hissed at him. The young programmer’s shirt was burned away and the flesh beneath was charred and smoking. Wiz could see the white of bone from his ribs and spine. He was still breathing, but his breath was coming in great harsh gasps.

"He’s dying," Jerry said quietly. His eyes were big and his face pale.

"Lord, unless you have powerful healing spells I am afraid this one is done for," Karin said quietly to Wiz.

"No," Wiz said without taking his eyes off Danny. "Nothing like that."

"Then I am truly sorry, my Lord."

"Goddamn!" Wiz breathed. If skilled healers could reach him in the next few minutes he still had a chance. But there were no healers among them and no way to get Danny to a healer in time. They could not walk the Wizard’s Way from inside the castle. The opposing magic was too strong. There just wasn’t time.

Time!

Quickly Wiz knelt again and reached for his friend’s arm. June bared her teeth again and fumbled in her skirt for her knife.

"I’m trying to save him, dammit!" June looked hard at him, but she relaxed slightly.

Wiz reached out and touched the ring of protection Danny still wore on his right hand. Before June could object he twisted the stone and Danny froze in stasis as the protection spell took hold.

"He’s all right," Wiz said to June. "Don’t you see? The spell will keep him safe until we can get him back to a healer." June looked down at her husband and bit her lip, but she made no move to touch the ring.

"Help me carry him further down the corridor." He turned to Karin. "I don’t think there are any more branches off this corridor until we get to the computer room. Once we move Danny, can you back your dragon up past the intersection and hold them off here?"

Karin nodded.

"Great. Jerry, help me move him. We don’t have to be too gentle. Stasis is better than a backboard."

"Then what?" asked Gilligan, looking down the corridor in the direction their attackers had fled.

"Then," Wiz said in a hard cold voice, "we’re gonna find that goddamn computer and stomp a couple of people flat."

Craig sat glued to his workstation and played as he had never played in his life. Slowly it dawned on him that this wasn’t just a couple of early setbacks. He was losing.

It wasn’t all one-sided. He was hurting them plenty, but it wasn’t enough. His carefully constructed defenses were washing away like sand. His warbots were powerful but the attackers were hitting him in ways they weren’t programmed to handle. If he took direct command of a unit he could do pretty well, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once and besides, his damn communications kept failing.

A motion at the corner of his screen caught his eye. There, superimposed on the glowing battle display, was a little manlike being perhaps six inches high. Unlike the rest of the screen image it was in full color and high resolution.

The thing turned toward him and pressed its face and palms against the inside of the tube, as if it was looking out. It wasn’t an image, Craig realized, there really was something inside his monitor!

The tiny being turned and gestured across the screen. Another manlike little thing stuck its head around the edge of the screen and peered at the world outside. Behind and around it the battle display scrolled on, unnoticed by the gremlins or by Craig.

The first creature tossed a glowing ball into the air and batted it with his free hand. The ball flew across the screen leaving a glowing trail behind it. The second thing leaped up and deflected it before it could touch the far side of the screen. The ball bounced off the bottom and ricocheted toward the upper right corner, smearing a goodly portion of the display. The first creature made a mighty jump and deflected it back toward the bottom left. His opponent dived for it, but the ball bounced over his head and off the side of the screen. The first gremlin chortled and held up a single finger.

Craig watched helplessly as his screen filled up with the lines of the ball tracks.

"Maintenance!" he yelled.

"He’s off this way," Glandurg called back to his companions. "Down this side shaft, now."

No more climbing for a bit, Glandurg thought. That’s a piece of good news. Although he never would have admitted it, he was just about done for. His arms and shoulders ached from clinging to fingerholds in the ventilation shaft and his calves and thighs were cramping from pressing his body flat against the wall. It would be a relief to just walk for a while.

He didn’t know how far they had climbed; a league or more, perhaps. But at last the arrow in the talisman had stopped pointing upward and was pointing off to the side.

As he started down the horizontal shaft, Glandurg reached back to touch the hilt of Blind Fury. Soon enough they’d be done with this climbing and sneaking into honest battle.

He wondered if battle was as exciting as the skald’s tales made it out to be.

It took nearly fifteen precious minutes for the maintenance robots to fix the display on Craig’s workstation. By the time he was back in control the situation had deteriorated even more. The last of his air force had been swept from the skies, and with it all of his recon drones. Now he was reduced to viewing the battle through the cameras and sensors mounted on the castle itself. Two critical outposts had fallen and even as he attempted to assert control a third one went.

In the southern quadrant the attackers were almost up to the last line of defenses at the base of the castle walls. Craig turned his attention there. Quickly he switched to one of the cameras on a forward emplacement to try to find a weak spot. He still had a couple of squadrons of warbots he could throw into the battle here, but he would have to command them directly if they were going to be any good.

As he scanned the line of approaching men, a shadow fell over the camera. He swiveled up in time to see a dragon diving straight at him. He flinched and tried to bring a weapon to bear but it was too late. The last view Craig had was of gaping jaws and an enormous golden eye as the dragon crashed head-on into the emplacement.

Cursing, he switched to an alternate view only to get a jerky low-resolution picture that barely resolved itself into blobs of light and dark. Two more switches and he found a camera high up on the walls that was working.

What he saw wasn’t good. Lines of dotlike figures, rendered tiny by the distance, were converging on the gates of the castle. Many of them were too close for the artillery, and the machine guns were strangely ineffective.

Some of the figures went down to energy beams or mines, but many more did not. They swarmed over the smoking ruins of his defenses and began to disappear down the tunnels.

Frantically, Craig ordered all his remaining robots to the lower levels to try to stem the attackers.

And then it was all too much. Craig turned and bolted from his war room, leaving the defenses entirely on automatic. He just couldn’t face any more fighting and losing.

Mikey! Mikey was working on something. Maybe Panda, the master hacker, could pull this out of the fire for them yet.

Mikey was sitting on a bench cradling something in his lap. As Craig came closer he saw it looked a lot like the figure that had been growing on the computer screen.

"We’ve got trouble, man."

"No we don’t," Mikey said softly. "We’ve won."

"Goddamn it, they’re all over the fucking castle!"

Mikey looked up at him and smiled. For the first time Craig saw the mad, red glint in his eyes. "It doesn’t matter," he said almost gently. "It’s all working according to plan.

"I was wrong about you, Craig," he went on in the same gentle, hair-raising tone. "You and your robots were important. You were a wonderful diversion. The robots got them to grab the computer. All we had to do was bring them here. Now we’ll crush them. We’ll just fucking annihilate them."

He caressed the black sphere in his lap. "We own the world. We own both worlds. And we’re going to prove it."

Craig drew back in horror.

"You’re fucking crazy!"

"No man, I’m sane. Crazy is letting these fucking maggots walk all over you."

He reached out and patted Craig’s forearm in a way that made Craig’s flesh creep.

"You did good, you know. You kept them so goddamn busy chasing around after your toys they never had a chance to focus on the serious stuff." He caressed the thing in his lap.

"They couldn’t get at it. Did you know that? For all their power they couldn’t make what they needed without us. They needed the computer. And they needed us."

Craig stared in horrified fascination.

"You see what that means, don’t you?" Mikey was talking to himself now, looking down at the black thing in his lap, crooning to it. "It means they’re not all-powerful. We can do things they can’t and that means we’re more powerful than they are.

"When I get done I’m gonna be master of all I survey." He chuckled and his eyes glinted even redder, like live coals. "I’m gonna rule the whole goddamn world."

Craig backed away from his former friend and then turned and ran.

There were problems, Glandurg admitted, even with an infallible magic direction finder.

It was undoubtedly pointing at the Sparrow, but it didn’t show the way to go to get to him. That was a problem when you were in a maze of ductwork that ran only in straight lines and right angles. A half-dozen times now they had followed the arrow directly only to be balked by a dead end. Glandurg suspected the Sparrow was moving around also. But so far they hadn’t gotten close enough to be sure.

They didn’t want to leave the vents. The roars, screams, explosions and gunfire echoing through the vents-not to mention the smell of burnt flesh-made it clear there was a battle going on out there.

"He is over this way," Glandurg told his weary followers. "Forward."

"We can’t go that way," Thorfin protested.

"And why not?"

"Because it’s a blind tunnel, that’s why."

"He’s right you know," Snorri put in. "We’ve been there twice already."

"I’m the leader and I say we bloody go this way!"

"You may be the leader, but you’ve got the sense of direction of a blind pig," Thorfin said without heat.

" ’S’truth," young Gimli added. "Remember the sewage tunnel back home."

Glandurg reddened and puffed up like a toad. Then he got control of himself and exhaled slowly.

"Very well," he bit out. "For this job I will appoint a scout. Snorri, you go first to find the way. But I’m still the leader, mind!"

Without a word, Snorri moved past Glandurg and led the party off.

What now? Craig tried desperately to think. The lower levels were already overrun, the control center was out of commission and he didn’t even want to think about what Mikey was up to. It couldn’t end like this. Not after so much. But now what?

It took him a minute to separate the shrill tone in his ear from the background noise of the battle and a minute longer to realize what it meant. The computer room! Someone had reached the computer room already. He touched a stud on his bracelet and the tiny screen lit up with a view of the computer room. He gaped at what he saw.

Zumwalt and the others were with the computer! Craig slapped his palm against his forehead and swore. A trojan horse! He’d brought them into the castle himself and they’d turned out to be a trojan horse. No wonder half his equipment wasn’t working. They must have been sabotaging it for days.

Craig looked at the tiny image and felt his gorge rise. Somehow those sonsofbitches were responsible for everything that had gone wrong since he got here. They were behind his defeat, his every loss.

Well, maybe he’d lose, but they sure as hell weren’t going to profit by it!

He turned on his heel and ran down the corridor, away from the War Room and toward his private workshop.

Craig met nothing in the halls. The robots and goblins were all fighting elsewhere. Half the lights were out and the elevators didn’t work. Now and again the sound of battle or a muffled explosion would reach him by some trick of acoustics, but otherwise the castle was deathly silent. Even the air tasted stale and he realized the air conditioning system had quit.

The automatic door opener wasn’t working either, so Craig had to use a spell to burn his way into his own workshop. Once inside, he pulled the door shut behind him and looked around.

There in the middle of the room, surrounded by scaffolding and equipment, was his latest creation: A full suit of Legion battle armor with some special improvements that no game master would ever have allowed.

The bottle-green armor glinted dully in the bright lights of the shop. It was almost twelve feet tall and so broad it looked squat by comparison. There was no neck, only a low rounded dome for a head. The arms were enormous, with oversized forearms to accommodate the blasters and heavy machine guns mounted in them. The hands were six-taloned metal claws, sharp as razors and hard enough to tear through armor steel. The legs were elephantine in proportion with all the actuators hidden behind layers of super-strong flexible armor.

It was hunched forward until its metal claws almost touched the ground and the upper back was opened up like a clam shell. In spite of his anger and haste, Craig stopped to pat the massive knee joint and look up approvingly.

Everything he knew, everything he had learned, was incorporated in this one lethal package. It wasn’t as big as his warbots, but thanks to the power of magic it was nearly as heavily armed. It could run at over a hundred miles an hour and slam through walls and buildings as if they were not there. Instead of jump jets it had anti-gravity plates that would let it fly from the surface of the planet out into space if the wearer wished. It could withstand a nuclear explosion and its own firepower was measured in kilotons per second. It was the ultimate warbot, the culmination of his dreams of power.

And now it existed for just one purpose. To destroy the people who had caused his ruin.

Craig mounted the scaffold and chinned himself on the grab bar to ease his legs into the suit. He wiggled the rest of his body in, fitting arms and legs into the sensor harnesses. Finally he touched a switch and the back sections slid noiselessly shut behind him.

He watched the screen displays for a moment as the power gauges rose levels and the view out the front port came alive with a network of glowing lines and cryptic inscriptions. A breath of cool air washed over him as the climate control system activated. This was one design that could stand up to dragon fire and not even feel it.

Once he was sure everything was operational, he stood erect and stepped away from the scaffolding, brushing it aside with a casual gesture that sent pieces ricocheting off the workshop walls. He turned and stepped lithely toward the door. As he passed the workbench he reached down and scooped up the thermonuclear hand grenades lying there. Maybe they would be good for something after all, he thought as he dropped them into a pouch on the armor.

Stigi couldn’t use his tail, but that didn’t matter much. He very nearly blocked the passage physically. The attackers’ only approach was through a mass of fire and straight into the dragon’s fangs and claws.

Even if the castle guards had been equipped with dragon-slaying arrows it would have been hard to take Stigi out. As it happened that wasn’t part of their equipment and so the problem was very nearly impossible. Warbots might have been able to handle Stigi, but they had all been sent to the lower levels to confront the League forces battling their way up through the castle.

Not that the guards stopped trying. They came on until their charred bodies reached nearly to the ceiling and then they climbed over the smoking corpses to keep coming. By the sheer mass of their onslaught they managed to force Stigi back a pace or two with every attack. But it was a long, straight corridor and Stigi had lots of room to back up.

The door at the end of the corridor was locked, but that didn’t stop Wiz. He wasn’t fancy about it, he just used a fireball to blow the lock off. Almost without breaking stride he kicked the door open and stepped through. Jerry and Mick were hard on his heels.

The computer was sitting in the middle of the floor, almost exactly where Wiz’s double had been standing when Mikey hit him with the fireball. It was up and running quietly away with the image of the key rotating slowly on the screen.

"Is it my imagination," Jerry asked, "or is that thing a lot more detailed than the last time we saw it?"

"Your imagination’s not that good. Let’s smash the computer and go get Craig and Mikey." Wiz raised his arms to throw another fireball, but Jerry put his hand on his shoulder.

"You’re not thinking. Without the key how are we going to close the gate?"

Wiz turned his head and looked at him. "What’s your plan?"

"Make a copy of the file first. Binary representation should be as good as any other for the purposes of spell casting."

Wiz dropped his arms and nodded. From down the corridor came roars and yells as Stigi held the entrance. "We’ve got the time. Let’s do it."

Craig heard the fight in the corridor as soon as he stepped off the stairs. The din echoed and re-echoed through the entire level of the castle. His sensors reported combustion byproducts in the air, including some that came from burning flesh. Finally he saw the carpet of bodies in the corridor leading to the computer room. Cautiously he stuck his massively armored head around the corner.

The smoke was so thick he had to resort to his sensors to see what was happening. Up ahead was a packed mass of warriors, some living, some dead and some wounded and down. Every one who could move was pressing ahead. As he watched the scene was backlit by an enormous gout of flame that turned the figures to black silhouettes against a fiery background.

With his battle armor he could undoubtedly charge through the mass and handle whatever was blocking his guards. But that would take time. What he wanted was to get his hands on Zumwalt as fast as possible.

He turned and ran back the way he came. Plenty of time to finish this bunch later.

Several hundred yards and a number of turnings later he was in the corridor leading to the side entrance to the computer room. He had only gone a few yards when he heard a rhythmic banging coming from an alcove ahead of him.

In the alcove two light warbots were beating their heads against the wall, literally. They would step forward, run into the wall, bounce back and then step forward again. From the looks of the wall they had been doing it for some time.

"Halt!" Craig ordered and the robots froze in midstep. Quickly he ran diagnostics and found the robots had a bug screwing up their obstacle-avoidance routines. Fortunately they were light warbots or they would have long since walked through the wall.

A couple of quick commands and the warbots were functional again.

"Follow me," Craig ordered and set off down the corridor with the two killing machines at his heels.

"Come on, damn you," Wiz muttered, but the tape cartridge spun on unheeding. He only wanted one file, but the file was enormous. The tape backup was designed for reliability over speed; its designers had never imagined someone would have to transfer information to tape in the middle of a battle.

"They’re in there," Snorri reported breathlessly. "I can hear them."

"At last." Glandurg thrust his scout out of the way. He turned to the others. "I will go first. Remember, give me room in battle to wield Blind Fury."

His followers nodded. Glandurg motioned the others to follow him and trotted forward, Blind Fury slapping against his back at every step.

Craig paused outside the door to the computer room. One more thing. He took a thermonuclear grenade from his belt pouch and pulled the pin. Now the only thing preventing a multi-megaton explosion was his clawed grip around the grenade. If anything happened and he loosened his hand, everyone in the tower would die in a flash of nuclear fire.

Then he kicked down the door.

The side door to the computer room fell in with a crash and Craig and his robots stormed in. Gilligan was at the main door watching the fight in the corridor and Wiz and Jerry were at the console waiting for the download to finish. All of them jerked up at the sight of the three armored apparitions bearing down on them.

"Kill!" Craig screamed. The robot to his left took one step forward, caught one foot behind the other and tripped headlong with a metallic crash. The second robot raised both its arms to sweep its built-in lasers across the group.

"Drop," Gilligan yelled and all of them pressed themselves to the floor as the beams of ruby incandescence swept toward them.

Wiz felt something gently warm across his back, unsquinched his eyes and looked up. The robot’s head swiveled back and forth as it looked from one gently glowing arm to another. It nodded twice, executed an about-face and marched headlong into the wall.

"Oh shit!" Craig screamed. Then he went for Wiz.

He could have used his blasters. He could have used his machine guns. He could have let go of the thermonuclear grenade. Instead he lumbered forward with one taloned hand outstretched. He didn’t just want to kill Zumwalt, he wanted to tear him apart, to trample him beneath the battle armor’s steel feet until there was nothing left but a thin red smear on the computer room floor.

Wiz dodged the first swipe of the hand by ducking under the massive arm. He got a desk between himself and Craig, but Craig picked the desk up one handed and threw it across the room. There was a terrific crash as the flying desk hit the window wall and the sheets of glass collapsed.

Mick Gilligan dropped to one knee and emptied his pistol at Craig. He ejected the empty magazine, slammed another home and kept on firing. Bullets bounced off Craig’s armor and ricocheted wildly around the laboratory, knocking up puffs of rock dust when they hit the wall and leaving neat holes in what was left of the big window.

Craig swiveled and pointed the arm holding the grenade at the pilot. A beam of roiling green fire lanced out. Mick dove for cover, but the very edge of the blaster bolt caught his left arm and side. He went down moaning.

Then Craig turned back to Wiz. Inexorably he closed in with one arm outstretched and his claws gaping. Wiz backed away, trying to dodge behind furniture. Craig kicked one piece after another out of his path as he herded Wiz back into a corner.

"Die, Wizard!"

In a single motion Glandurg kicked the grille free and sprang from the vent, screaming his war cry and brandishing Blind Fury. The enchanted sword hummed through the air in a mighty blow aimed straight at Wiz’s neck. At the last minute the blade twisted and struck Craig’s battle armor, slicing through the armor plate just above the knee joint.

Craig stopped and looked down in wonder at the oil and fluids gushing out of the cut. Slowly and almost gently the leg collapsed under him and he sank to one knee. Wiz just stared open-mouthed.

Undaunted, Glandurg drew back and struck at Wiz two-handed. Again the sword twisted, this time upward to catch Craig in his massively armored chest. Again the sword bit deep, cleaving through magically enhanced armor and what lay beneath it.

The suit’s speakers amplified Craig’s scream to a deafening level. Sparks and fluids poured out of the gaping wound in his chest. He rose on his good leg and tried to stagger back. The suit’s gyros moaned as they worked to hold him upright, then screeched as the bearings failed for lack of lubricant. Craig rocked backward, caught himself, overcorrected and fell forward just as Glandurg brought Blind Fury down in a mighty overhead chop to cleave Wiz in half.

Instead the enchanted sword connected with the back of the battle armor’s domed head. Blind Fury went deep and came out with the tip stained with a wash of crimson. The battle armor jerked convulsively and then lay still.

Glandurg looked down at the fallen metal giant, over at Wiz and up at his bloodstained blade.

"Shit," he said.

Then he looked down at his feet. A gray, egg-shaped object had rolled clear of the armor’s lax hand. Now it lay on the floor between the dwarf and his quarry hissing quietly.

The dwarves didn’t know what the thing was, but their magic told them it was dangerous. Very dangerous.

"Run away!" Glandurg yelled to his men. It was wasted breath. The dwarves had turned as one and jumped for the air vent. There was a mad scramble as dwarves bounced off each other in mid-air, pushed one another out of the way and tried to squeeze three dwarves through an opening that wasn’t big enough for two. Glandurg wasn’t the first through the vent, but he wasn’t the last either.

Wiz and the others pressed themselves flat behind the console as the grenade hissed evilly. Then the hissing stopped. Wiz jammed his fingers in his ears and squinched his eyes tightly shut waiting for the explosion.

At last he opened his eyes, took his fingers out of his ears and cautiously peered around the corner of the console.

The deadly gray egg still lay in the middle of the room, rocking gently. As Wiz watched, the fuse protruding from one end slowly unscrewed itself and fell to the floor. A tiny head poked out of the fuse hole and peered about, enormous ears flapping.

The gremlin pulled itself out of the grenade and grinned widely at Wiz.

"Wheee," it squeaked.