The Wizardry Quested

EIGHTEEN LIFE AS WE WISH WE DIDN’T KNOW IT

"So anyway:" Charlie leaned back against the bar and gestured expansively. There I was at fifteen thousand feet. Nothing between me and the ground but an air mattress."

The walls might be hung with squadron banners, old riding leathers, weapons and bits of dragon harness. The floor might be stone, the ceiling hewn beams and the leather-clad men and women dragon riders, but it was still a pilot’s meeting place and Charlie fit right in, international orange flight suit and all. Two or three of the dragon riders were gathered around him at the bar, listening intently. Several more were scattered around at the tables paying half attention. Off in the corner Mick and Karin were enjoying each other’s company.

"Did he really do all these things?" Karin whispered.

They’re flying stories," Mick whispered in her ear, pausing to nibble a bit on the lobe. "You know the difference between a fairy tale and a flying story? A fairy tale starts ’Once upon a time:’ and a flying story starts ’No shit, this really happened.

Karin turned to grin at him. The move deprived Mick of an earlobe but the tradeoff wasn’t that bad. "We have a similar saying. He does it well, though." The room exploded in laughter as Charlie reached the punch line.

"Oh, he’s entertaining," Mick said quietly.

"But you don’t like him?"

"Let’s say our styles are different. We have another saying. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots. Charlie’s one of the, ah, boldest pilots I’ve ever met."

"He is not young either," Karin pointed out.

"He’s lucky then. But luck runs out, especially if you push it"

The programmers’ workroom was as warm and cheery as the tavern, but there were only two inhabitants. Moira had long since excused herself and now only Taj and Jerry remained. Jerry was hoarse from talking and beginning to fade around the edges, but Taj was as eager and alert as a beagle on the trail of a rabbit. There were no less than eight "screens" hanging above Jerry’s desk, most tiled with several windows, as Jerry led Tajikawa through the basics of the magic compiler and how to write software for magic. Taj already had a pile of scrolls beside him to read later and he was pushing Jerry hard on subtle points of the system.

"Well, then there’s this for example." Taj pointed to a section of the compiler code written in glowing letters in thin air. "It’s in here but you don’t seem to use ft."

"Oh, that’s an indeterminate instruction," Jerry told him. "You’ve heard of the DWIM instruction, Do What I Mean? That’s kinda an ’IDAIDWP.’"

Taj cocked an eyebrow. "Ida id wip?"

"I’ll Do As I Damn Well Please. You can’t be sure what it will do from one time to the next"

"Cute, but why’d you write it that way?"

"We didn’t. Remember, the bottom layer of the compiler, the elements we built the rest of it from, are tiny spells that exist here naturally. But we only use a subset of what’s available. Some we don’t use because they’re redundant, as far as we can tell. But some of them, like this one, don’t produce reliable results. We think it’s something analogous to a quantum uncertainty effect operating on a gross level"

He pointed to the fiery letters again. "This one was particularly tricky. Most of the time it works consistently, which is why it made it into a beta of the compiler. But about one time in a hundred it does something else. Which is why we didn’t use it."

"Have you got a list of those things?" Taj asked.

"The indeterminate instructions? Some of them. Mostly we didn’t bother. Why?"

"I want to play with them a little."

"Be careful. Some of those things are damn dangerous and we don’t know all the dangerous ones. Why mess with them?"

"Because," the Tajmanian Devil said, "you learn the most about a system by observing it when it becomes unstable."

"Yeah, well just remember that around here when the system becomes unstable you can get caught in a system crash. It nearly happened to us once and it wasn’t fun." He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. "Look, I’m about done in. How about we continue this tomorrow?

"You go on. I want to go on with this stuff a little."

Jerry hesitated. "What did you have in mind?"

"I was thinking I’d just take the docs and dive right in."

Jerry frowned "That’s not a real good idea. Danny tried that when he first got here and ended up stuck in a DO loop."

"So? That happens."

Jerry shook his head. "You don’t understand. When I say he got stuck in a DO loop, I mean he got stuck In a DO loop, repeating the same action over and over. Someone like had to get him out of it."

Taj looked serious. "I take your point. But I still want to keep going." The big programmer considered. "Probably the best thing to do is start you out with some simple little nothing spells so you can get the feel of things. He glanced around and spotted some pieces of wood on Wiz’s desk. "Wait a minute, here’s something." He picked up a stack of slats with writing on them and handed them to Taj. "Study these and the docs tonight and we’ll take a crack at them tomorrow.’’

The Tajmanian Devil looked at the strips of wood and cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

"This is a spell one of the wizards wrote. Only there’s something wrong with it and it doesn’t work. It’s pretty harmless stuff, it just brightens and dims the lights, but it will give you some practice with the tool kit and the language."

"Sounds good. Where shall I work?"

"You can use Wiz’s desk. Tomorrow I’ll get you in on his system. When you’ve got that problem spotted, I’ve got a couple of other things around here. But don’t try to do anything tonight on your own. Remember, this stuffs dangerous." It was June who heard it first. They were picking their way down a straight section of tunnel when Danny’s wife hissed and suddenly her knife was in her hand.

"What?" Wiz asked over his shoulder.

"Shut up!" Danny commanded. Everyone froze. "I hear something down that way."

"What?"

"I don’t know. Shut up and let me listen, will you?"

Instinctively the group had arrayed itself facing the side tunnel. There was a faint scrape as Malkin’s rapier cleared its scabbard. Glandurg strode to the front, hand on the hilt of Blind Fury.

"Light exe!" Wiz commanded and a globe of blue light sprang from his fingertips. He gestured and the witch fight began to float down the side tunnel toward the source of the sound.

At first there was nothing to see. The tunnel was empty as far as the globe’s light reached. But no, there was something:

For an instant Wiz thought the tunnel was carpeted in brown-and-gray fur. Then he realized the carpet was writhing as if alive. As the mass moved out into the light he saw that it was an army of rats, packed shoulder to shoulder and climbing over each other in their eagerness to get at the humans.

"Rats! Danny yelled and he and Wiz raised their staffs simultaneously.

"lightning rapidfire exe!"

Lightning bolts flashed and scythed through the charging mass, slaying hundreds, but the rats closed ranks and came on. Their eyes glowed feral red in the magic light.

Wiz gestured to the floor and the earth shook, bringing dust and clods of dirt down on the party. A chasm opened before the oncoming army. The rats took no notice and kept coming. Row after row of them disappeared into the crack in the earth, but others leapt across, some of them pushing off from the backs of their fellows as they tumbled into the pit.

With a flash of steel that nearly took Wiz’s nose off, Glandurg drew Blind Fury and waded into the survivors. The blade’s curse kept him from hitting the rats he aimed at, but it didn’t matter. No matter where he struck there were rats aplenty.

Malkin stepped forward and lashed out with her rapier, skewering rat after rat. When she had three or four writhing on her blade she flicked it back toward the mass of rats, sending her victims twisting through the air and back into the horde.

Still the rats came on. Now a dozen or more of them were scrabbling up Glandurg as if he were a ladder, seeking chinks in his armor. Danny and June were laying about, he with his staff and she with her knife. But for every rat they struck down three more charged in.

Glandurg and Malkin were in front so Wiz couldn’t get a clear shot. He danced back and forth, trying to find an opening for a lightning bolt. Then suddenly he had a better idea. He raised his staff and began to chant.

The oncoming wave of rats convulsed, stopped and then turned tail and ran squealing. As quickly as the tunnel had filled with rats it was empty, save for the corpses and a few survivors locked in combat with the humans.

Three or four rats were still clinging to Glandurg, including one with its teeth buried in his cheek. Without wincing the dwarf reached up and jerked the rat free. Then he held the squealing creature up before his face and glared at it. With a single quick motion Glandurg bit the rat who had bitten him back, taking off the animal’s head with a single chomp. He spat the head out and tossed the corpse away.

"Impudent pest," he muttered.

"Outasight," Danny breathed. "Say, do you listen to Ozzie Osburne?" The dwarf only scowled. For once Wiz was glad Glandurg was on their side. Malkin was breathing heavily and bleeding from several bites on her arms and legs. "What did you do?"

"Jamming spell," Wiz panted. "I figured those things were being driven by magic, so I interfered with any magic in the area. Once the spell was broken the rats panicked."

"Nice trick," the tall thief said as she resheathed her rapier. She looked at the bites on her sword arm. "Pity you didn’t think of it sooner."

"I’ll try to do better the next time," Wiz said without a trace of irony.

"Meanwhile people, let’s get out of here. All that magic is likely to attract more trouble."

Several hundred yards and dozens of twists and turns later, the party found a cul-de-sac where they felt safe enough to rest and treat their wounds. June had some of Moira’s salve in her pack and she applied it to everyone’s rat bites. Even Glandurg consented to have his wounds smeared with the pungent brown ointment The sharp, minty smell and the plain little pot from Moira’s stillroom brought a lump to Wiz’s throat. He noticed that even as she treated their wounds June didn’t turn her back on the tunnel entrance.

"Any idea where we are?" Wiz asked Danny.

"Lost," the younger man said as he fished into his tunic for the magic compass. He looked down at the glowing disk "I don’t know where we are, but what we’re after is off that way."

"Any sign of anything else?"

Danny squinted at the detector. "Not that I can pick up. This whole area’s lousy with magic, but none of it seems immediately hostile." He dropped the talisman back on his chest. "This thing’s getting less effective because of all the magical interference. Pretty soon it’s not going to work at all."

That was unwelcome but not unexpected so Wiz didn’t reply. "Okay, spread out. Danny you take the lead this time. And look out for those side tunnels."

"Remember," Charlie told Malus for about the hundredth time, "that baby’s fragile."

"Fear not, My Lord," the apple-cheeked wizard assured him. "We will be as gentle with it as a queen cat with her kits."

"I mean, I’ve put that baby into places it was hard to get out of, but this is ridiculous."

"It has posed a bit of a problem," Malus admitted, "but I believe we have solved it to everyone’s satisfaction."

They rounded the corner of the hall in time to see an apprentice wizard moving several of blocks of stone. He was walking backward holding a wand and the blocks were bobbing along behind him like ducklings behind their mother. Charlie stopped dead at the sight. "What’s holding those rocks up? Skyhooks?"

"That is not what we call the spell," said Malus.

Charlie’s eyes followed the line of floating stones across the courtyard. "You could put a bunch of helicopter pilots out of work with that."

The doors of the great hall were large enough to accommodate a cavalry dragon, but the creature would have to stoop and bend to get through. Charlie’s biplane couldn’t stoop and bend, so a team of workmen and a couple of wizards had spent the better part of two days taking off the doors and removing stones to expand the opening.

"We’re ready, Lord," one of the workmen said as he came over to join them.

"All tight," Charlie said. "Let me get into the cockpit and you put your guys on the lower wing. I’ll take the brakes off and you can push it out."

"Then what, Lord?" asked the foreman.

Charlie looked around the stone-walled court and sighed. Then I guess she’ll just sit there on gate guard. No other use for her here," he added sadly. That evening Wiz called another council of war. "Okay people, you know we’re running low on food?"

Nods all the way around. The dried vegetables, fruit and grains that constituted this world’s "iron rations" were easy to carry, but there was still a limit to how much they had brought with them.

"Well, on the theory that we’d have to head back, at least to replenish our supplies, I ran some tests this afternoon."

Tests?" Danny asked.

Wiz grinned but there was no humor in it. "I’m developing a nasty, suspicious nature down here. I wanted to make sure we could walk the Wizard’s Way with no trouble."

"I take it there was trouble?" Malkin asked dryly.

"In spades. I can’t open the way. It’s closed. Blocked by some kind of magical jamming."

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

"So we can’t go back?" Danny asked at last.

"Looks not."

This smells like a trap," Danny said. "Like we’ve been lured in."

"Lured?" asked Glandurg. "We have had to fight every step of the way. Only the power of Blind Fury has brought us this far."

That wasn’t the way Wiz remembered it, but he didn’t object.

This reminds me of Shiara’s tale of the cursed tomb that took her sight and magic,’’ Malkin said quietly. That was a trap too, but the trap was cloaked by a series of other traps designed to eliminate those who were not clever and possessed of strong magic.’’

There was silence while they all considered the possibilities. June moved closer to Danny and he slipped his arm around her shoulders.

"So what do we do about it?" Danny asked finally.

"Well," Wiz said slowly, "We can’t go back." He looked around the group, hoping someone would dispute the point, but no one did "So we’ve got to go forward against this thing."

"Seems to me we’ve got just one chance," Danny said at last.

"What?"

The young programmer flicked a tight little smile. "We’re gonna have to be a whole lot tougher than the thing that set this trap in the first place."

"Yes!" roared Glandurg and brandished Blind Fury aloft. The gesture drove the sword into the tunnel roof, knocking a liberal shower of fine, choking dirt down on them all.

Spitting, sneezing and brushing dirt out of their eyes, the other members of the group glared at the dwarf. He grinned sheepishly and carefully returned the sword to its scabbard.

"This stuffs trickier than I thought," E.T. Tajikawa said when Jerry broke to refill his tea mug. For the last two days he had been working his way systematically through the compiler and development system, coming back to Malus’ light dimming spell from time to time.

"It has its peculiarities," the big programmer agreed as he ambled over to look at Taj’s work "What’s the problem?"

Taj grinned sheepishly. "Probably really simple because I can’t find it. The listing looks fine."

For an instant Jerry wondered if Taj was really as good as his reputation.

"Well," he asked carefully, "how does it fail?"

"That’s the nasty part. It’s apparently an intermittent because I can’t get it to fail at all."

Jerry leaned over Taj’s shoulder and peered closely at the program, running down the instructions. That’s funny. I don’t see anything there that would cause an intermittent."

"You mean you don’t know what’s wrong with it?"

"Well, no," Jerry admitted. "Wiz was working on it when: well anyway. Let’s see."

A quick command and Jerry executed the program. The lights in the workroom brightened promptly.

"That’s real weird."

"You mean it isn’t me?"

"No. That’s what it’s supposed to do. Except Malus said it didn’t work."

"I think," Taj said slowly, "maybe we’d better have a talk with this Malus character."

Jerry hesitated. Of all the problems they faced, a sticky light switch spell was far and away the least important. But Taj was quivering like a bird dog and the truth was that Jerry wasn’t getting anywhere with what he was doing. What the heck? he thought, we might learn something.

They found Malus in the Wizards’ Day Room, digesting lunch and talking to a few of his fellow wizards. Winter sun filtered weakly though the large diamond-paned windows and a small fire in the carved stone fireplace took the chill off the air. Magic provided most of the heat and light but the fire and windows added warmth and coziness.

"Malus, could you try this spell again?"

"Certainly, My Lord," the wizard said, getting up from his chair. "Have you found the problem?"

"I’m not sure. I want to see you do it."

"Very well."

Malus picked up the wooden strips, arranged them on a small table and then spoke the command.

Instead of brightening, the magic glow lamps in the Day Room flickered, dimmed, brightened and then dropped to a febrile glimmer.

Jerry and Taj looked at each other in the sudden gloom.

"Let me try," Jerry said.

This time the spell worked perfectly.

"That doesn’t make:"

"Wait a minute!" Taj cut him off. "Do you each have physically separate copies of the compiler or are they all just instantations of the same compiler?" Jerry looked at him. "I don’t know. I never thought about it."

"Might be interesting to find out," Taj said.

"My Lord," Jerry said to the little wizard, "will you list out the compiler for me?"

It was Malus’ turn to frown. "Very well. "Emac."

Instantly a little demon with a green eyeshade popped into existence. Jerry noticed it was rounder than the ones he was used to. In fact it looked a lot like Malus himself.

"?" the demon said.

"list compiler exe," Malus pronounced, and the demon removed a quill pen from behind a large bat-like ear and began to scribble lines of fiery letters in the air.

The compiler was big and took a while. By now several other wizards, had gathered around to watch.

"Shall I list out the libraries and include files as well, My Lord?" Malus asked when the Emac at last completed its task.

"No, this is fine for now," Jerry told him. "Emac." he commanded, and proceeded to order the demon to list out the compiler again. Taj watched closely, but aside from the fact that Malus’ Emac wrote in letters of golden fire and Jerry’s preferred electric blue he couldn’t see any difference.

"Now," he said, as the second demon finished.

"Emac."

The blue fire superimposed itself on the yellow. Suddenly several sections of the code stood out in brilliant green.

"Your version of the spell compiler. It’s different." Jerry checked the changed sections against Malus’ spell. "Your spell didn’t work because something messed with your copy of the compiler. The program was fine but the tool was broken."

"But, My Lord, I can assure you I have done nothing to change it!"

"I believe you," Jerry said. And, he didn’t add aloud, that’s what scares me. A quick check of the other wizards present in the day room showed that two of them had compilers which had suffered minor changes, but none so great as Malus’.

"I wonder how many other broken copies of the compiler are loose around the castle? Or broken anything else?" Jerry said as the last wizard in the group checked out clean. "I think we’d better start a sweep of the software."

"You go ahead," Taj told him. "I’ve got some stuff I want to check up on." Jerry was so engrossed in the problem he only nodded, forgetting his objections to Taj going out on his own.

"Well," Jerry said tiredly a few hours later, "we were lucky. So far we’ve only turned up a half-dozen infected programs." He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. "Maybe more than lucky. We didn’t exactly build the spells to be virus-proof but we were real conservative in our design. There’s an error-correcting code built into every spell and if the check sums and such don’t match it won’t execute. Plus the critical stuff uses triple redundancy."

"I noticed," Taj said. "Is there any pattern to what’s been attacked?"

"Not that I can find. There’s a lot of stuff here that’s been nibbled around the edges but aside from Malus’ copy of the compiler nothing else serious is really broken. Damn! I wish Wiz and Danny were here."

"Need some more insights, eh?"

"That’s part of it. But now I’m going to have to go through and design anti-virus software to protect every spell we’ve got. It would be easier if there were three of us doing it."

Taj looked at the changed code again. "Who’s writing these puppies?" Jerry shrugged. "If I had to guess I’d say it’s our enemy in the City of Night."

"Seems kind of piddly for a deliberate attack. Are you sure none of your students worked these up?"

Jerry shook his head. "You don’t understand how seriously these people take magic. This isn’t like a bunch of bored high school lads or out-of-work Bulgarians. Everyone here respects magic too much to do something like this for the hell or it."

Taj looked skeptical. "This thing came from somewhere."

"Yeah," Jerry said. "And that’s what worries me. One more thing that worries me."

Moira rose dripping from the bath. The water streamed off, making little rivulets between her shoulder-blades and breasts, splitting at her swelling belly and dripping off her sparse orange thatch of pubic hair. She stepped out onto the tiled floor and a skeletal hand offered her a towel.

She accepted it without noticing either her attendant’s appearance or smell. In life the zombie maid had been a harem attendant for a mighty wizard of the Dark League. She had died on the surface when her master’s palace collapsed and had lain there until the new master of the City of Night had claimed her. Even in this cold land, decay had set in while she lay dead on the surface and now that she was often in the steamy atmosphere of the bath her rotting flesh seethed with maggots.

Neither sight nor smell mattered to Moira’s body or the intelligence that animated it. Bathing was necessary for human health, so Moira bathed, fallowing barely remembered rituals gleamed from the dead brains of its other servants. In the same way the body was fed, exercised and rested, cared for as a brood mare is cared for. Not for the sake of the body, but for the sake of what it would bear. Or more correctly, what would be torn from it at the proper time, since natural childbirth played no more role in the Enemy’s plans than did a normal child.

Oblivious, unseeing and uncaring, Moira finished rubbing herself down and accepted the shift and long, fur-lined black robe from her shambling attendant. Then she sat as the decaying creature tenderly but clumsily pulled on her boots. Warmth is important to human health as well.

"Okay," E. T. Tajikawa said, "there’s part of your problem."

Jerry, Bal-Simba and Moira all crowded around the table. Jerry squinted at the glowing letters over the Tajmanian Devil’s desk. Some of them were the conventional magic notation used for writing spells in the code compilers. Others were odd symbols he had never seen before. The result made no sense at all.

Squatting underneath was the demon the code fragment manifested.

It had a nasty sneer on its face-or at least on its top, Jerry amended. The thing sat on six spindly legs like a demented version of a Lunar Lander. The main body was cylindrical and semi-transparent. Inside were vague outlines of something coiled into a long spiral. The top, where the face was, was a regular geometric solid, a dodecahedron, he realized after making a quick count of the edges on each surface.

"What the heck is it?"

"It’s a virus," Taj told him. "You’ve got an infection in your system."

"Holy shit," Jerry breathed. "But how?"

Taj just shrugged.

Jerry tore his eyes away from the demon and examined the spell more closely.

"Does that make any sense to you?" Taj asked.

Jerry just shook his head. "For one thing it’s not entirely in standard magic notation. More than that, well, it just doesn’t make a Tot of sense. What does it do?"

"It attaches itself to a spell and starts shifting instructions around or combining them."

Jerry bit his lower lip. There was something terribly wrong with this but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what yet.

"Could it be a weapon?"

"If it is it’s a piss-poor one. The thing’s not very destructive and it’s hardly hidden at all. It doesn’t poly-morph and if you know the sequence you can grep it out of any spell it’s in."

Everyone was silent for a moment.

"There’s something not right about this," Jerry said

That appears to be an understatement," Bal-Simba said mildly.

"No, I mean there’s something really wrong here. Something we’re missing." Moira cocked her serpent-like head. "Another of your premonitions?"

"More like a feeling, but yeah. That sort of thing."

Moira furrowed her scaly brow. She had been more intimately associated with the programmers than Bal-Simba or any of the other wizards and she knew Jerry’s knack for spotting problems even if he couldn’t quite grasp the whole.

"You’ve never had a virus here before?" Taj asked.

Jerry shook his head. "Now that it’s happened I can see how it could, but no."

"Hmm," Bal-Simba said, staring at the glowing letters. "Do you think it is related?"

"Directly? No. But I suspect it’s a manifestation of the same kind of underlying phenomenon. Sort of the fundamental particle of your problem."

"And it works by sticking stuff together," Jerry said in an effort to forestall the inevitable. "Let me guess, you call this a glue-on, right?"

Taj brightened. "Hey, that’s a good name for it"

"Me and my big mouth," Jerry muttered. "Anyway, it still doesn’t explain who our enemy is."

"What about," Taj said slowly, "the possibility that the glue-on arose naturally? It’s not very complicated. Only about a dozen basic instructions."

"I suppose that’s possible," Jerry said equally slowly. "Like I say, we’ve never seen that. But we really haven’t been here long."

"Where do you suppose all these complicated magical phenomena come from?"

"Around here that’s like asking why the sky is blue. They just are."

"The sky’s blue for a reason," Taj pointed out.

"It’s something we never really wondered about."

Taj smiled, looking more satanic than ever. "Those are the ones that get you in the worst trouble."

While Jerry chewed on that Taj went back to wandering about the room restlessly, looking at things without quite seeing them. He came to rest in front of Danny’s magical fish tank and suddenly froze like a bird dog coming on point. The rainbow denizens of the tank were oblivious to him, but everyone else in the room was suddenly watching him intently.

"Those fish aren’t natural, are they?"

"No, that’s something Danny was working on for his son," Jerry told him.

"Do they change?" he asked in a peculiar voice.

Jerry frowned, remembering his earlier misgivings. "Yeah. He made them so they’d change over time. They kinda mutate."

"But they don’t follow a pre-programmed pattern?"

"I don’t think so."

Taj turned back to the fish tank and stared fascinated.

"Bingo!" he breathed softly. "Oh, boy howdy!"

"You’ve found something?"

"Alfie."

"Huh?"

"Alfie-A-Life, you know artificial life."

"What do you guys know about artificial life?"

Jerry shrugged. "It only got hot after we came here. We’ve been following the newsgroups on the net."

"Its a very rapidly developing field."

"As good as its hype?"

Taj snorted. "Get real. But they’re still getting some interesting results, especially with evolutionary systems." He paused. "What’s more, I’ll bet your enemy isn’t ’someone’, it’s ’something’-the mother of all artificial life programs."

Zombie army ants. The phrase flashed in Jerry’s mind.

"Meaning the thing’s not alive?"

Taj shrugged. "Define ’life’ and I’ll tell you. What it definitely means is that you’ve got stuff breeding out there."

"Wait a minute, A-life has to have a purpose. There’s a design."

Taj gave another of his satanic smiles. "Teleological reasoning. The A-life we’re familiar with is designed originally because humans created it. But there’s nothing that says there has to be a designer. If you’ve got the right conditions and the right precursors it could arise spontaneously." He looked over at the fish tank "Offhand I’d say you have the right conditions here.

"From what you’ve told me, there’s natural magic everywhere, but the spells didn’t combine very well. So now you guys come along and develop your spell compiler that sticks little spells together and eventually these things pick up the trick."

"But we didn’t write anything like that," Jerry protested.

"Not necessary that you do. This kind of genetic crossover has been known for a long time in bacteria and a couple of workers have produced it in artificial life programs." He frowned. "So then the question is, how much available resources do they have? You sort of indicated that magic is an infinite resource here, right?"

"Well, not exactly. Some areas are more magical than others. There are dead zones all through the Wild Wood, for instance. And at times you can produce something like a magical drain effect and some resources become scarce. Wiz did that in his attack on the City of Night." It was his turn to frown. "But that kind of thing is rare. There’s an awful lot of available magic out there." Taj nodded. "Makes sense. If you’re really resource constrained it’s hard to get any kind of complex development. You get the equivalent of lichens and algae. If there’s no constraint you lose a potent driver for evolution. But if there’s a lot of resources before you hit the constraints:" he shrugged.

"Jeez," Jerry muttered.

"Okay, now suppose that these things are out there, these little spells, competing for resources. It becomes survival of the fittest. The things that can grab the most resources and hold on to them best survive longest."

"And we started that?"

Taj pursed his lips. "Actually that probably pre-dates you. I suspect that’s where this world’s naturally occurring demons and such come from. What you added were code fragments that made it easier for pieces to combine."

"So we are responsible."

"Law of nature, man. You can’t do just one thing. Anyway, eventually this proto-evolutionary process turns out our friend the glue-on." He nodded toward the desktop where the virus sat. Jerry thought it didn’t look like anyone’s friend, but before he could say that, Taj was off again. "Now you throw in something like this recombinant virus and the things that survive are the ones that get reproduced."

He shrugged, "Kind of like an artificial life version of Core Wars, only we’re in the core." He laughed. "Evolution in action. I’ll bet by now there’s a whole ecology out there."

"Wonderful," groaned Jerry.

"That too," Taj agreed, obviously having missed his tone. The big question is how high a lambda have you got?"

"Lambda?"

"Information mutability. If information is hard to change you stifle any kind of evolution. If it’s too easy to change self-organization doesn’t have a chance. There’s a fairly narrow band where A-life is possible."

Jerry thought about that. He didn’t like it, but it made sense. "We know some areas are less magical than others. The whole place around the City of Night is an especially magically active zone. Plus there’s a lot of leftover magic down there from the days of the Dark League."

"And we have kept scant watch there," Bal-Simba rumbled. "My fault, I am afraid."

"So," Taj said, "these things had the equivalent of a petri dish where they could grow and evolve. And now you’ve got something that’s looking to spread out."

"Why is it so hostile?"

"Because that’s the way it evolved. Maybe it gives the thing an edge in surviving, maybe it’s an accidental characteristic, like something it picked up along the way."

"Point is, that it’s out there and that’s the most likely explanation for what’s going on here." Taj shook his head. "Boy, what the guys at the Santa Fe Institute wouldn’t give to see this."

"What we wouldn’t give to see the last of it," Jerry retorted "The real question is how do we stop it?"

"Now that," said the Tajmanian Devil, "is going to take a little thought."

"More strangeness, Lord."

Bal-Simba had had about all the strangeness he could stand in the last few weeks, but he forbore to say so to the chief Watcher. "What and where?" he asked.

Erus, the head of the watchers, was a lean gray-haired man with a broken beak of a nose and fierce blue eyes. Years of stooping over a scrying crystal had left him with a permanent slouch.

"Where is to the south, out over the Freshened Sea. As to what:" He shrugged. They travel in groups, and they seek darkness or clouds, but each day they range further north."

Bal-Simba grunted. "Enough of both at this time of the year, what with long nights and winter storms over the Freshened Sea. You say you have never encountered them before. What are they most like?"

Erus hesitated. Like most of those in his line of work he disliked making guesses, but for him as for all of them guessing was part of the job. "Lord, they appear to be ridden dragons, at least for the most part."

"For the most part?"

"There are other things as well, but not so many. Mostly they seem to be dragons, but of an odd sort."

"Odd in what way?"

"Like the rest of this thing’s magic-cold." He looked up at Bal-Simba. "Lord, I have never seen anything like it. Nor have any of the other Watchers."

"What do you think they are doing?"

"I cannot say with certainty, but it appears they are scouting, perhaps testing our defenses. At their present rate they will reach our lands ere long." Bal-Simba considered. "Then best we seek these things out to see what they are. Order our patrols south again, but cautiously. And try to steer them to a small group they can meet in overwhelming strength."

"Jerry tells me you have developed a weapon against our enemy," Bal-Simba said without preamble as he walked into the programmers’ work room.

"Yep," Taj said proudly. "It’s a lysing virus. Or maybe a self-reproducing restriction enzyme would be a better way to describe it"

Jerry squinted at the code hanging above the desk Taj was using. "Describing it in English would be better yet"

"Okay," Taj said. "Basically the problem is that this virus of the enemy’s glues spells together, with some transcription errors. Then those new spells compete against each other in what amounts to a Core Wars tournament where only the fittest survive. Eventually the winners get big and nasty."

He gestured to the code. "What this virus does is exactly the opposite. It breaks spells into pieces at certain specific points, sort of makes them come unglued."

"What’s going to prevent this thing from running wild and reducing every piece of code to rubble?"

Tajikawa smiled, looking more satanic than ever. "It won’t affect a piece of code smaller than a certain size."

"Wait a minute. How do you keep the anti-virus from mutating?"

Again the satanic smile. "You can’t. It has to mutate if it’s going to do its job because the sticky virus is going to mutate. But we can make sure it won’t attack anything smaller than the limit. Here, take a look."

Jerry scanned the indicated portion of the code.

Taj reached past him and pointed to several sections of the listing. You will note that there is not a test in there for code size. Nor is it localized to one part of the program. It’s more subtle than that."

Jerry nodded. "Clever."

"As far as we know there are no programs that big. None of yours anyway. It won’t prevent things from forming, but it will limit their size and that will probably limit their power."

"Probably?"

Taj shrugged. "Theoretically these things could become efficient enough to be pretty potent within that limit, but with the smaller code sizes the global minima tend to be in pretty steep wells on the state surface. Plus there are a lot of local minima to act as traps. A genetic algorithm might reach a minimum but it would be pretty much a random event. Like the monkeys at the typewriters trying to produce Shakespeare." He frowned. "Of course there is a question of how many monkeys and typewriters we’ve got here." He got a faraway look as he considered the problem.

"Will this thing leave us worse off?" asked Bal-Simba, who had understood perhaps a quarter of what Tajikawa had just said.

"No."

"Then we will do it." He paused. "How long will it take for this thing to work?"

"It starts as soon as we tell it to execute," Taj said. It will start here and then spread like the original virus did."

"Wait a minute," Jerry said, "how long will it take to affect what’s in the City of Night?"

"That’s a ways from here right?"

"And it’s protected by some kind of magic barrier."

"Oh, the barrier shouldn’t be a problem. Eventually it will diffuse through or be carried through by an infected spell."

"How long," Jerry asked slowly, "is eventually?"

"Fermi numbers, around ten years."

Bal-Simba looked at him. "What kind of numbers?"

"Fermi numbers. You know, within an order of magnitude."

"In other words," Jerry added, "it could happen in anywhere from one year to a century." He shook his head, "But even a year is way too long."

"Well, if you’re closer it would strike faster. If you’re right next to this thing when you invoke the program it would get it right away."

Jerry sighed. "Okay then. We’re going to have to get in there to make this work."

"That will not be easy," Bal-Simba told him.

"Wiz and the others did it."

"I am afraid that way is blocked now," Bal-Simba told him. "We cannot walk the Wizards Way and the city is ever-more-strongly guarded by the Enemy’s non-living servants."

There’s another problem," Taj pointed out. "This thing’s likely to react to your presence, right?"

"I would call that an understatement," rumbled Bal-Simba.

"Well, understand, its going to take the lysing virus a while to work on anything that’s fairly complicated. If this thing has developed something like an immune system to keep it from being taken over by the competition, it may take a few hours, or even days." He caught the others’ expressions. "Too long, huh?"

"For the main enemy, way too long. The first thing it will try to do is eat our lunch-and us with it. We can’t wait hours, we need to knock it down immediately."

"How inorganic," Taj sighed. "All right, let’s go back and take it from first principles again."

They took special care to find a secure resting place that evening. Malkin seemed abstracted all through the dinner meal, but she didn’t say anything until they were finished.

"I have been thinking about what you said, about the monsters getting more dangerous as we come closer to our goal," she said to Wiz as they cleaned the last of the dinner dishes.

"And?"

"Have the monsters been getting more dangerous?"

Wiz thought about it. "No, not really."

"And have we encountered greater numbers of them?"

An ugly little prickle of his neck hair told Wiz he wasn’t going to like where this was going. "No," he admitted.

"Then," Malkin asked, "are we sure we are getting closer to our goal?"

"Well, the seeker says we’re going in the right direction."

Malkin just looked at him.

"I’m really beginning to wonder about that seeker," Danny said. "I know this place is big but we should be at least a little closer to Moira than when we started."

"Maybe it’s been getting brighter so slowly we didn’t notice," Wiz suggested. Malkin reached out and tapped his shoulder. "The glow only extends out to this smudge on your right breast. That’s where it was yesterday and the day before."

"Are you sure?"

"Trust me. In my profession you notice these things. You always hold the crystal in the same place, straight out from your breastbone to the length of the cord around your neck."

Wiz thought about that. Then he looked down at the crystal. Then he thought about it some more. Not very pleasant thoughts.

"Let’s see something."

"Emac."

Instantly a two-foot-high demon with a big bald head, flapping ears, glasses and a green eyeshade appeared before him.

"?," said the little demon.

"backslash list find_moira exe."

The creature took a quill pen from behind one enormous ear and began to scribble fiery letters in the air. Wiz and his fellow adventurers were soon bathed in warm yellow light from the golden letters hanging before them.

"Wait a minute!" Danny said almost as soon as the Emac finished writing. "That doesn’t look right." He pointed with his staff at a section of the code.

"It’s not," Wiz said sourly. "Neither is that," he added as his staff jabbed out, "that or that."

"The spell’s been sabotaged!"

"Who?" demanded Glandurg. "Who has played such a foul trick upon us?"

"If I had to guess, I’d say the Enemy," Wiz said. "Okay folks, gather around, it’s conference time."

The party sat down on a convenient patch of rocks and all of them looked at Wiz expectantly. "Well," he said to break the silence, "what are our options?" No one wanted to mention the obvious one: Give up, try to make their way to the surface and wait for rescue.

"Dwarves can find their way underground," Danny suggested. "Perhaps Glandurg can guide us?"

"I would have to know where we were going," the dwarf said shortly.

"Impractical."

"Besides," Malkin said, "he tends to get lost."

"Slander," hissed the dwarf.

"Okay, settle down, people. The important thing is it won’t work" Glandurg and Malkin glared at each other but obeyed.

"What about re-casting the seeker spell?" Malkin asked after a minute.

"Hard to do. We could write a new spell easily enough, but we need something like a lock of Moira’s hair to focus the spell." He sighed. "If Moira’s personality were still with her body we could work something up to seek that, but otherwise we’ve got to have something intimately connected with her."

"Her cloak," June said from her place beside Danny. "Like mine."

"Similarity isn’t good enough I’m afraid."

"From the same cloth. Made at the same time."

With a pang Wiz remembered the long summer afternoons when Moira and June had sat together under a rose bower at Wizards’ Keep, sewing the matching cloaks for the coming winter and watching Ian and Caitlin romp among the rose bushes. Sometimes they had worked together, with a cloak stretched across their knees as they sat side by side or across from each other.

"Wait a minute! You both worked on Moira’s cloak, didn’t you?"

June nodded.

"Did you ever prick your finger while you worked and get blood on the cloak?" A hesitation and then another nod.

"Jackpot! Okay, we can do this then."

Everyone looked at him. "DNA," he explained. "If June got blood on the cloak her DNA is still on there."

"Washed it," June said defensively.

"I’m sure you didn’t get it all out. We can home on your DNA."’

Danny grinned. "Yeah, and because it’s uniquely hers it will stand out almost as strongly as a true name." Then his face fell. "Wait a minute. How are you going to make it sensitive enough to find June’s blood on Moira’s cloak with June standing right here?"

"I’ve got a way to make a spell directional, like an antenna. As long as June’s not in the beam, her presence won’t interfere."

"Let’s get to it, then."

In the event it took several hours to produce and check the spell. Part of that was because Wiz and Danny took good care to armor the code against tampering and to sprinkle alarms throughout the program to warn of attempted subversion. Part of it was the usual quota of unexpected problems and glitches. Part of it was simply that it’s harder to work sitting on rocks in a cave than it is in your own workroom. So while Glandurg fidgeted, Malkin watched and June did whatever June did, the pair turned out a new spell.

The only real difficulty came in drawing a sample of June’s blood for comparison. June was so eager to hero she slashed a four-inch gash in her arm and Wiz and Danny had to break off preparing the spell to give her first aid. Finally they held up the finished product and commanded it to find Moira. Almost instantly the pointer lit up and swung around, pointing almost back the way they had come.

"Wonderful,’’ Danny said glumly. "We have been going in the wrong direction." Wiz ached to get going in the new direction but common sense prevailed. "In the morning. Let’s get a good night’s rest and then we’ll head out. And this time we’ll be heading for Moira."

Honesty compelled him to admit that what they’d actually be heading for was Moira’s cloak. There was no guarantee Moira would still be with it. He tried very hard to push that thought out of his mind.

They moved out the next morning in good order and somber spirits. Once again Malkin led the way and Wiz followed, staff at the ready. His senses were alert but his mind was elsewhere. Malkin was right. The defenses of this place didn’t make any sense in the real world. They made sense in terms of a fantasy role-playing game, but there weren’t any fantasy role-playing games here. The only people in this World now who knew about such things were Danny, Jerry and himself. There had been Craig and Mikey, two computer crackers who had come to this World and hooked up with the forces of primal chaos. But Craig was dead and Mikey was a mindless husk held under tight guard at the Wizards’ Keep. So where had the idea come from?

Damn, he thought for about the thousandth time, I wish we knew what we are fighting.

"Well," E.T. Tajikawa said, "there’s your weapon."

On the table sat a golden globe about the size of a softball.

"Behold the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch," Taj said with a sweeping gesture.

"It’s what you might call an anti-takeover device-a poison pill."

"You intend to poison the Enemy?" Bal-Simba asked.

"Actually we’re going to hand him a retrovirus and he’s going to do a number on himself."

Both Bal-Simba and Jerry waited for him to continue.

"It started with those indeterminate instructions, the ones you call I’ll Do As I Damn Well Please, IDAIDWP."

His audience looked apprehensive. "Go on," the big wizard said slowly."

"Okay, first I divided them into two categories: Regular IDAIDWP and FU-IDAIDWP."

"Foo ida id wip?" Jerry asked.

"Eff you ida id wip," Taj corrected. "What you might call IDAIDWP with an attitude. Anyway, I rolled the FU-IDAIDWPs into the nastiest package I could dream up, added some interface code to make it easy for the Enemy to absorb and wrapped it in the prettiest package I could find." He gestured. "Viola."

"That’s voila."

Taj gave him his satanic grin. "Not the way I play it."

Taj looked at Jerry. "Okay, you say this thing’s instinct is to absorb whatever’s tossed at it."

"Well, humans that attack it, anyway."

"Close enough. Essentially what this thing does is to insert a sequence with a bunch of indeterminate instructions into the thing’s code. You feed it to The Blob out there and the critter self-destructs."

"Nasty," Jerry said. "I like it." He paused. "What’s the downside?" Taj pursed his lips. "Well, there is one tiring that might be a problem. It’s got to be absorbed all at once so we’ve got to get pretty close to make it work"

"How close?"

"For immediate effect? About hand grenade range."

For a minute no one said anything. "So we’ve got to jump down this thing’s throat, right?"

Taj shrugged. "If you want it to work right away and if you want to be sure you get the main bad guy"

No one said anything. There’s another problem," Taj added helpfully. This things been bred to learn quick. If you don’t make it the first time it will be a whole lot harder the next time." He paused and looked hard at them. "Basically I’d say we’ve got one shot at this."

Another pause. "I believe," said Bal-Simba, "this is what Charlie would call a sporty proposition."

NINETEEN OPERATIONAL PLAN

With the weapon came the stirrings of a plan. Soon the Wizards’ Keep was abuzz with preparations. Since the Watchers were still unable to establish communication with Wiz and his party, the first order of business was to combine an attack on the Enemy with a rescue operation. In his or her own way everyone readied themselves for what was to come.

"So this is what the enemy stronghold looks like?" Kuznetsov asked Jerry as they walked down the stonewalled tunnel.

"Something like this. Only smaller and not as neat."

The Russian sized up the space with the professional interest of an engineer who had been given the job of building the place-or a sapper who had the job of blowing it up.

Kuznetsov had wanted to see what the "battlefield" would look like. The closest thing Jerry could come up with was the cellars and storerooms under the Wizards’ Keep. It wasn’t that close to the tunnels beneath the City of Night, but Kuznetsov assured him it would help.

"Now there’re a lot more levels and twists and turns," Jerry added as Kuznetsov knelt down to examine the way the stones fit. He produced a knife and scratched at the space between the rocks, held the scrapings to his nose and sniffed them.

"But just this mortar? No concrete?"

Jerry thought for an instant. "I’ve never seen concrete in this World." Kuznetsov grunted, stood up, and then said something quickly to Vasily. The other Russian nodded and set off down the tunnel.

"And these lamps." Kuznetsov indicated the magic glow light that floated above their head. This is standard illumination?"

"Yeah. What’s Vasily doing?"

"We are seeing how close enemy can get before we see him. This is very important in urban combat."

"This isn’t exactly a city."

Kuznetsov grinned. "I believe your saying is ’Close enough for government work.’

" He looked down the tunnel and motioned to his partner. Peering out past the edges of the light, Jerry couldn’t see him, but apparently Kuznetsov could.

"Now he comes back hiding behind cover and in shadows," Kuznetsov said without taking his eyes off the tunnel. "The way an enemy would approach."

By straining his eyes Jerry thought he could detect an occasional flicker of movement down the corridor. Finally, when Vasily was almost on them he caught a glimpse of him sidling along a wall and whipping into an open storeroom.

"He’s really good."

"He was a specialist," Kuznetsov said, and smiled as if he had made a joke. There was an explosion of Russian from the storeroom and Vasily came charging out with no attempt to hide.

He pointed back to the room and spat out something long and complicated in Russian.

Kuznetsov whistled. "Da shto ve gavorete?"

"Po Pravda!" Vasily confirmed.

"What was that about?’ Jerry asked.

The Russian looked at Jerry strangely. "Let us say we just discovered that our paths have crossed before, indirectly. You might even say that you are the ones who got us started in our present line of work." He waved away Jerry’s frown.

"Never mind. It was another time and another country."

The Russians were silent as they climbed the stairs from the cellar. They declined Jerry’s offer of a warming drink.

"Comrade Major, do you realize what this means?" Vasily hissed in Russian as soon as Jerry turned the corner.

"It means we have solved another mystery my friend. Now we know how the computer disappeared from the airplane."

Kuznetsov sighed and grinned. "It takes you back, does it not, to the days when the world was young, our hearts were pure and there was no problem in human relations which could not be solved by the application of sufficient quantities of high explosive?"

He sighed once more. "Life was so much simpler then."

"Complexity?" Bal-Simba echoed in bewilderment.

"Complexity," Taj repeated with a satanic grin. The weakness of all centralized systems is that they cannot handle complexity beyond a certain level."

"And you are certain of this?"

He spread his hands. "It’s inherent in the state equations. If we wanna give this boy indigestion we start by giving him a nervous breakdown."

"What in the world are you doing?" Jerry asked as he walked into the workroom.

"Origami," Taj said cheerfully. "Great way to relax."

Jerry looked over the collection of cranes and other creatures scattered over the benchtop.

"Parchment’s kind of scarce. We can’t waste it on stuff like that."

"Oh, it’s not a waste," Taj said cheerfully. Then he held up his latest creation. "See, here’s a dragon."

Jerry looked past the long-necked shape at the litter of parchment scraps on the table. "It’s still not a very good use for parchment."

Taj smiled evilly. "Wanna bet?"

The rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape told Gilligan that Vasily was sharpening something. When he got close he saw it wasn’t a knife or a sword. It was a small shovel with a two-foot handle. An entrenching tool in fact

"Where’d you find that?"

"Castle smith made it for me," the Russian told him. He laid the stone aside and sighted down the shovel blade, turning it slightly so the light struck the edge.

"Almost ready now."

"Going to dig your way out of trouble?"

In a single cat-like motion Vasily twisted and hurled the entrenching tool overhand. It flew end-over-end and buried itself in a post twenty feet away with a twang. The shovel stuck there with its handle vibrating from the force of the impact.

"Good for digging, too," The Russian said. Then he walked over and wrenched the blade out of the timber.

Gilligan nodded. "Where’s Kuznetsov?"

Vasily inspected the edge of the blade critically. "With the big wizard," he said without looking up.

Gilligan himself had spent a good part of the time trying to figure out how he could get into the battle. As a pilot with nearly two thousand hours in Air Force fighters he felt supremely confident. Unfortunately, riding a dragon takes a different skill set than flying an F-15.

Besides which, the dragons didn’t like him. Every time he entered the aerie he was greeted by growls and roars from the monsters. Gilligan suspected that Stigi had been talking. Karin said that was impossible, but Gilligan knew better. Of course planning was the major form of preparation.

"It is in our favor that nothing has tried strongly to breach the physical barriers," Bal-Simba told the group assembled in his work room. "The Enemy has not had the opportunity to learn how to defend against it."

"It seems to have put up defenses enough," Dragon Leader remarked as he studied the magical map showing the known patrol routes from the City of Night

"We think that’s more reflex than planning," Jerry said "If you’ll notice these tracks pretty much match the Dark League’s patrolling when they controlled the city. But circumstances have changed and that leaves holes here," he said as he stabbed a finger onto the map, "here and especially to the south."

"What’s more, they’re not flying smart," Gilligan said, "at least not from what the Watchers have seen."

"We have not been allowed to test these fliers yet." There was a note of reproach in Dragon Leader’s voice.

"That will come soon enough," Bal-Simba told him. "Meanwhile we do not want to, ah, ’tip our fingers.’ "

"That’s tip our hand," Jerry corrected "Yeah, we want them dumb when we hit them."

Bal-Simba caught his air group commander’s expression. "Never fear, you will have the opportunity to test them very soon, but under controlled conditions."

"Meanwhile," Jerry said, "the basic plan for the main attack will be to lure him out over the Freshened Sea with a dummy strike and then hit from another direction."

"Bakka Valley," Gilligan said.

Kuznetsov nodded. "Koyuechno. We spoof them to show themselves and then the second wave eliminates them."

Dragon Leader nodded "We can expect most of their air power to be drawn north, but that still leaves their ground defenses plus whatever they hold back for point defense."

"Well, there’s a trick we used on the second Schweinfurt raid," Charlie said. Gilligan did a quick calculation and gave Charlie a hard look.

The older man caught it. "Okay," he amended. "Someone used it when the Eighth hit Schweinfurt the second time."

Dragon Leader ignored the byplay. There is still the problem of the inner defenses."

"We may just have to fight our way through those," Bal-Simba said. "Expensive, I know."

"Maybe we can come up with something as we go along," Jerry added.

Dragon Leader looked thoughtfully at the map.

TWENTY SKY ZOMBIES

Well, Dragon Leader thought, at least the rain has stopped. Not that much of an improvement. The air was clammy with moisture and the cold and damp seeped into everything. There were no warming spells which might give them away to the enemy they sought so carefully.

Dragon Leader pulled his inner flying cloak closer about him, breathing in the odor of lanolin as he drew air through the thick wool to try to keep out the cold. Behind him nearly a full squadron of the North’s dragon cavalry spread out in stepped formation. It was no comfort to him to know the riders were all as miserable as he was.

Somewhere ahead of them lay-what? The forces of the Enemy. Probably other dragon cavalry, so the Watchers said, but his job was to find out for certain. His other job was to be cautious in doing it. Well enough, this wasn’t the time for open battle if it could be avoided, and he and his troop would go carefully. He scanned the sky ahead, eyes always moving, looking off the center of his vision to catch any movement. Not that he could see far. The wan winter sun was nearly at its zenith, but below them was a solid gray mass of fog-like cloud, tinged with rainbow where the sun caught it right.

Dragon Leader shifted uneasily in his saddle. He didn’t like this at all. Fighting in clouds was bad business and according to the Watchers their quarry preferred clouds and darkness to light. That was odd, but not unknown. Dragons, being sight hunters, preferred to fly by day. Just one more peculiarity to weigh upon him.

"Dragon Leader," came a voice in his ear. "Dragon Leader, we have your target at widdershins low. Range about three leagues." Dragon Leader did not break communications silence to acknowledge the message. Instead he rose in his stirrups and signaled his squadron into attack formation. The less magic used now the harder it would be for the enemy to detect them.

Behind him the squadron tightened up and sorted itself out into pairs and simultaneously into a box formation. Almost, Dragon Leader nodded approval. Weeks of hard drill had paid off. The movement was as smooth and precise as any veteran squadron during the long war against the Dark League. The dragons were carefully spaced to provide the maximum amount of maneuvering room consistent with interlocking fields of fire. Dragon Leader reached behind him in the saddle and drew his great bow from its scabbard. Then he selected an iron death arrow from the quiver by his right knee and fitted ft loosely to the string. With a practiced motion of the right hand he pulled the straps securing him to the saddle tight, but not too tight. Then he turned his full attention to scouting ahead.

The white crystal set into his saddle horn began to darken on the left side. Magic in that direction, then. He signaled the squadron onto a new heading. The magic detector was passive and emitted almost no magic of its own, but it was not very sensitive. He knew that the Watchers in the Wizards’ Keep were following them closely, but at this distance they could not follow the battle in fine detail. Once the enemy was sighted they’ would be able to see through the eyes of the dragon riders but for now they could not help them locate the enemy. Following the directions of the detector Dragon Leader led his squadron lower until his dragon’s wingtips almost touched the rainbow-tinged clouds. Still no sign of the enemy, but something was making the dragons very nervous. Dragon Leaders own mount nearly shied beneath him and out of the corner of his eye he saw others toss their heads in unease.

One of the flight leaders waved, relaying a signal from further out in the patrol. Dragons in sight! Dragon Leader strained his eyes and saw dark, amorphous forms rising out of the clouds toward them. With a touch of his knees he wheeled his mount around to set up an attack as soon as the enemy came out of the clouds.

Definitely ridden dragons. But there was something strange about them. Dragon Leader pushed the uneasiness out of his mind and drew his war bow. Ahead of him the leader of the third, left-most, flight lined up for the first attack. The enemy dragons glided up out of the clouds with their wings outstretched. First one rider’s head broke the mist, then another and another. Apparently oblivious to the threat above and behind them they continued to climb into perfect position for the ambushers.

Dragon Leader watched as the leader of the third flight led the attack in a fast, shallow dive, aiming to fire on the rearmost of the exposed dragons and then swoop away without dropping into the concealing clouds. The rest of his flight would follow him in, each taking the next dragon left in line. If the enemy was really unaware, the lead dragon might not realize the formation was under attack until all his fellows were down.

The flight leaders attack was textbook perfect and his release beautifully timed as he fired the iron death arrow into the enemy dragon’s flank. Even from the distance Dragon Leader saw the arrow strike home.

The enemy dragon reared its head against slack reins and looked back over its shoulder at the attacker. Then a burst of dragon fire caught the flight leader and his dragon as they climbed away from me formation, sending them plummeting from the sky in a blazing mass. Unconcerned by the deadly arrow sticking in its side, the dragon turned to face the oncoming foe.

Another death arrow struck the dragon, and another and another as the remaining members of the flight hastily shifted their aim. One of them tore a hole in the dragon’s wing and one pinned the rider to his saddle. The rider was no more bothered than his mount. He merely swiveled in his saddle to send off his own arrow over the dragon’s flanks. The draw was stiff, the release jerky and the arrow wavered past its intended target without effect But by this time another Northern dragon and rider were down and the melee became general.

Jerry and Taj were hard at it in the programmers’ workroom when Bal-Simba sought them out. The giant black wizard looked as grim as Jerry had ever seen him.

"There is a new factor we must consider in our planning," he said without preamble. "The enemy has a weapon we were not expecting."

Jerry’s first impulse was to say something like "what else is new?", but the look on Bal-Simba’s face stopped him. "What?"

"Animated corpses. Our enemy wakes the dead."

"Zombies?"

"Dragons and riders alike." The distaste was plain on Bal-Simba’s face.

"Such-things-are not unknown. But not even the Dark League meddled with them overmuch."

Jerry bit his lip. "We haven’t either, except in movies."

"No one in the North has experience with them," Bal-Simba went on. There are tales, however. They all agree they are difficult to create and harder still to control. Nor do they make satisfactory servants. They are merely puppets dancing on strings."

"Maybe this guy’s found another way to make them work," Taj suggested.

"So it would seem. A strong patrol of dragon cavalry engaged a flight of the Enemy’s this afternoon and we lost six riders and as many dragons." The corner of his mouth quirked up in what might have been an attempt at a smile. "Our riders were using death arrows."

"And you can’t kill a zombie," Taj said, "So how do you stop them?"

"The body must be destroyed so as to render it useless to the animating intelligence. We were finally able to do so, but at a cost far too high. Such things are very hard to stop."

Jerry and Taj looked at each other.

"If you will excuse me, My Lords, I must call upon the families of the riders we have lost. Should you require further information Arianne will be able to assist you." With that he turned and left the workroom.

TWENTY-ONE STAND TO YOUR GLASSES

The wing gathered in the tavern that night, but no one was drinking. Off in the corner three squadron leaders sat with their heads together, talking in low tones. Occasionally one of them would make the hand motions which are the universal language of fliers. Some of the others gathered in twos and threes to talk quietly as well. Most of the riders just sat. Occasionally there would be an outburst of wrath and the sound of a mug shattering as it was thrown against a wall. Dragon Leader stood alone by the bar, sunk in a brown study. You could have heard a pin drop when Charlie walked through the door. Seemingly oblivious to the mood of the place he bellied up to his accustomed spot at the bar.

"Heard you boys had a little scrap today," the old pilot said. "How many did you lose?"

"Six," the man at the bar said shortly.

Charlie gave a low whistle. ’Tough. Really tough. But I’ve seen worse, believe me. One time in Korea we were still flying P-5ls, we got jumped by a bunch of Migs and lost half our squadron."

Still no one said anything.

"Aw, hell. Come on boys, the drinks are on me. Bar-keep, set ’em up!" No one moved. No one said a word.

"My Lord."

Charlie turned and found Dragon Leader standing too close behind him. This is not the time or place for you," he said quietly. "It would be best if you go somewhere else."

Charlie opened his mouth, perhaps to apologize, and Dragon Leader moved even closer. "Now," he said.

Charlie closed his mouth and left.

Karin was late getting home that evening and for some reason that troubled Mick. She had been working with Stigi as she did every day. Since the first time Mick had stayed away from the aerie.

He had heard about the battle and the losses, of course, and he expected she’d spend some time with her squadron mates in the complex, wordless process of pilots’ grieving for those fallen. But it was very late indeed when she finally returned to their quarters.

"Hi, beautiful," he said and took her in his arms, only to feel her tense.

"Mick, we need to talk"

Uh-oh, thought Gilligan, who had been married long enough to know what that meant.

He sat down at the table. "Would you like some tea?"

Karin shook her head and settled into the chair across the table from him. "I’ve asked to rejoin my squadron."

"What?"

That means I must move back to the barracks," she rushed on, "so I can be ready to fly at an instant’s notice."

That’s pretty heavy," Mick said at last.

Karin leaned forward to put her hand on his arm. "It won’t be that bad. There’ll still be time to see each other and I’ll only be at ready six or seven days out of ten."

"You know that’s not what’s worrying me." Well, not the main thing, he thought. She hesitated. "Mick, we lost too many riders to the zombies. We need every dragon and every experienced rider now."

Mick didn’t say anything.

"This is not like the machines you flew. It is no more dangerous than riding horseback."

And how many people have been killed falling off horses? But he didn’t say it.

"There’s a big operation coming up," he said finally.

"And you thought I would stay out of it?" The color drained from her cheeks and she pressed her lips together in a tight line. "What do you think I am? Did you honestly believe I would desert my mates at a time like this?"

Gilligan gave her his best winsome, little-boy smile. "Well, I could hope." As soon as he said it he knew it was wrong. Karin went even whiter and stood up so fast she almost knocked the chair over.

"I must return to my squadron," she said woodenly. "I will be back later for my things."

Gilligan opened his mouth to apologize, to say the words that would make her stay. But there were no words, so he just nodded and looked at his hands. Sometimes it’s worth freezing your buns off just to be alone. Jerry stood on the battlements and stared off into the night. The stars were back again, shining like bright, hard bits of metal in a crystal clear sky. The air smelled of cold and nothing else. Even the sounds were gone.

Jerry slipped one hand out of the relative warmth of his heavy cloak and pulled the fur-trimmed hood closer around his nose. The fur smelled faintly of cedar even in the nose-numbing cold. He made no move to go back in.

So stand to your glasses steady: This world is a world full of lies. It was Charlie, obviously very much the worse for wear. From the way he was staggering Jerry was afraid he was going to fall off the walkway into the courtyard two stories below.

He was bareheaded and wearing only his flight suit and flying jacket; not even gloves. The old pilot must be freezing in this weather but he seemed too full of drink and his own concerns to notice.

"How ya doin’?" he slurred as he came up to Jerry.

"Okay," Jerry said neutrally, hoping he’d take the hint.

He didn’t "I got my ears pinned back good an’ proper tonight," Charlie told him with an air of alcoholic confession. "I butted into something that wasn’t my affair, squadron business, and I got what I damn well deserved."

Jerry nodded and didn’t say anything.

"A squadron’s like a family, son. There’s times outsiders are welcome and there’s times they ain’t. Forget that and you’re gonna get slapped down." Some comment seemed called for. "You must have run into that in Vietnam," Jerry said.

Charlie leaned on the parapet and stared out into the freezing night.

"I wasn’t in Vietnam," the old man said softly. "Hell son, I didn’t learn to fly until I was thirty-two." He turned back to look at Terry.

"You know what I was? I was an accountant. A goddamn accountant! But I got lucky and I was in the right place at the right time and when we went public I walked away with nearly twelve million bucks.

"A good chunk of that went to my second wife, but I was still left with more money than any normal human being can spend in a lifetime of trying. The day we closed the deal, I came out of the lawyer’s office, tore off my coat and tie, threw ’em in a trash can and I vowed I’d spend the rest of my life doing exactly what I wanted.

"Oh yeah, I got what I wanted." He smiled off into the darkness but there was no humor in it. "Maybe what I deserved."

Charlie hawked and spat out into the crystal night.

"Thirty years of doing just what I wanted and you know what that adds up to? Not a bucket of warm piss.

"I’m sixty-three years old, I got a drinking problem, diabetes and a cardiac arrhythmia that’s probably gonna kill me if the other stuff don’t get me first."

"Sounds like you had fun, anyway," Jerry said neutrally.

Charlie turned to face him. "You know what I found? Too much fun ain’t fun any more. You need some kind of purpose to make it all mean something." He waggled a finger under Jerry’s nose. "Now you, you’ve been dragged from pillar to post. But you know what? All of that was for a cause. It means something.

Take this here. You’re gonna go charging off to rescue your lady love and maybe save the world

"Maybe you’ll win, maybe you’ll lose. But when it comes to the end you’re gonna be able to look back on your life and say it meant something.

"Son," the old man said, "from where I stand you’ve got nothing to complain about."

TWENTY-TWO FINDING A PLACE

Mick Gilligan peered down onto the floor of the aerie, trying to pick a familiar blond head out of the dozen or so mounted dragon riders assembled below for the dawn patrol. But the aerie was softly lit and the observation balcony where he stood was high. He thought Karin was the third in line, but he couldn’t be sure. At an unheard command the first dragon lumbered forward, spreading its great bat wings as it picked up speed. In five strides it blocked the daylight and then it was out of the cave, its wings beating strongly. By that time the second dragon had started its run and the third was straining forward. One by one the beasts and their riders poured put of the door and vanished into the bright blue beyond. Mick waited until the last of them had gone and turned away as the grooms and other ground crew swarmed out onto the floor to prepare for further operations.

"Forgive me, My Lord," came a gentle female voice behind him. "You seem troubled." Gilligan turned and started when he found himself face-to-face with a dragon.

"Yeah, I guess I am," Gilligan said, ignoring his questioner’s physical form.

"You are worried about Karin, are you not?"

"She asked to be put back on flying status. We had a big fight."

"She is a dragon rider, after all," Moira said gently. "As a flier, surety you can understand how she feels."

"Yeah, but it’s different from this side of the fence.

I’m getting some of my own back" His mouth quirked bitterly. "You know something? I don’t like it."

Shit! Telling my problems to a dragon. Well, it was no crazier than the rest of this place.

"We seldom do," Moira agreed. For a while both of them stared at the bustle of activity in the aerie below without talking.

"What brings you here?" Gilligan asked.

"Watching me dragons. I enjoy it-or rather this body enjoys it." She sighed.

"Sometimes I am not sure of the difference any more."

Charlie was at Bal-Simbas door early the next morning. That was surprising because the old man had established himself as a late riser. Looking at his generally disheveled condition and smelling the alcohol on his breath, Bal-Simba surmised he hadn’t been to bed yet.

"I need to talk to you," Charlie said without preamble.

"I am at your disposal, My Lord." Bal Simba gestured to a chair but Charlie kept standing.

"You’ve got a big show coming up," Charlie said. "I want a piece of it. Flying." Bal-Simba cocked his head. "On a dragon? I believe your machine will not work here."

"You mean it won’t fly under its own power," Charlie corrected, "But if you guys can float a big rock you can float a plane."

"Perhaps, but-without meaning offense- what can your craft do that dragons cannot do better?"

A broad smile spread over Charlies face. "Confuse the hell out of ’em."

"Eh?"

"You need a distraction, right? Okay, Mick and the nerds tell me that comes down to an ECM problem. Electronic Counter-Measures," he added quickly at Bal-Simba’s puzzled look. "You need something that will spoof them into thinking you’re coming at them from one direction when you’re really gonna hit them blind-side." He leaned forward and put his hands on Bal-Simba’s work table, heedless of etiquette. "So we load the Colt up with all the magic it can carry and your wizards wave their wands to make it fry. I go blasting toward the Enemy, radiating magic like it was going out of style. They’ll know something is coming, but they won’t know what. It will be radiating enough magic to cover every dragon in the North."

In spite of himself, Bal-Simba nodded.

Charlie grinned. "The best part of it is that even once they acquire me visually they still won’t know what the hell they’ve got They can’t just break off like they would with a drone."

The big wizard grinned mirthlessly. "You mean they would continue to pursue you and try to destroy you. We cannot spare the dragons to protect you. Not a safe position, I fear."

The old man grinned back equally mirthlessly. "It’s sporty son. Downright sporty."

Bal-Simba looked more closely at the pilot, and thought hard. The man was apparently sincere and undoubtedly sober enough to understand what he was suggesting. Having such a strange thing at the center of the magic would indeed confuse the Enemy.

"I will see what I can do," he told Charlie.

Dragon Leader ignored the constant boom of the sea as it crashed on the nearly vertical rock. He was not much given to conversation and there was no need as long as he kept an eye on his wingman. His wingman had climbed to the top of the pinnacle to watch for intruders. Dragon Leader surveyed the jagged fissures, overhangs and holes in the rock.

Their dragons were resting in the great crack that nearly cleaved the place in two. They were invisible, save from the proper angle at close range. They had not sought a confrontation with the Enemy’s dragons this time. Instead they had sneaked south by a roundabout route to this place and several others similarly situated.

The Executioner was as bleak and unattractive as its name. A snag of red-black volcanic rock thrusting above the restless gray sea like a monstrous fang. All around it lay Murder Shoals, the names a tribute to the terror these places inspired in those who sailed the Freshened Sea.

Even here, as far "inland" as it was possible to get on this place, spray stung his eyes. The chill, wet air sucked the heat from his body. It was not a comfortable place, but he had known that before he came. Comfort was not one of the parameters he was interested in.

Dragon Leader nodded to himself. The place would do.

Mick was having a drink in the pilot’s bar. It was the one place in the Wizards’ Keep where he felt really comfortable-as long as Karin and the members of her squadron weren’t around.

Drinking by myself again, he thought. I gotta cut this out. It wasn’t as bad as Vegas. He wasn’t drinking as much and it was brown ale rather than whiskey-which apparently didn’t exist here-but he’d still rather be doing other things. Part of it was that he felt like a rat and he didn’t know how to apologize, or even if the apology would be accepted if he could find a way to make it. He’d have to get Karin alone and try sometime soon, but she was avoiding him and staying down in the pilots’ quarters.

He took another swig of ale as someone came over to join him. Looking up he saw it was one of the squadron leaders from the air wing.

"Join you?"

Gilligan waved him to a seat.

"The wing was out practicing today," said the man, whose name, Gilligan remembered, was Martinus or something like that.

Gilligan nodded "I was watching from the war room."

"What did you think?"

"Still needs a little work."

They say you’ve done operations like this before," Martinus said.

"Something like."

This complicated?"

"Pretty much."

"How do you keep it straight?"

Gilligan considered. Although the dragon riders were skilled fliers and sometimes fought in wing or multi-wing strength they apparently seldom coordinated more than a squadron attack at once. More, the idea of closely coordinating forces which were out of sight of each other was completely alien to them.

"Practice is part of it, of course," Gilligan said, "but scheduling is more of it. One of the things we’ve found is that scheduling is a force multiplier. It lets us put maximum effort on the target at the right times."

The other looked interested and said nothing.

"So the first thing we do is draft an ATO, that’s an air tasking order, that coordinates the entire operation. That comes down from the very top with basic assignments, timetable and such. Then each lower echelon fleshes it out so it all works together."

"Could you draft this-ATO-for this operation?" Martinus asked.

Traditional role for grounded pilots, he thought to himself, pushing paper.

"Sure, but it’d take time. Normally we’ve got software to help us." Off in the corner a tall blond woman in a wizard’s robe was listening intently. Mick vaguely recognized her as someone he’d seen hanging around with Bal-Simba.

"Basically it’s a matter of deciding what you want to do when and working backwards."

"It sounds complicated."

"Used to take a whole room full of staff officers to do it. Now we have specialized software, but before that we used to do it on spreadsheets." The other nodded. "It would take something the size of a sheet to write all of this down."

"No, it’s a piece of software, a program. But you don’t have those here do you?" He thought for a minute. "You know, I’ll bet Jerry and his friends could turn one out in no time."

"The Mighty are all busy at their own tasks," the other grunted.

"Forgive me, My Lords." Mick turned and saw the blond woman had joined them. "I could not help overhearing and I think perhaps we can convince the wizards to give you what you want." She turned toward Mick. "You are the Great Gilligan, are you not?"

It took Mick a second to recognize how his rank had transmuted. "That’s major. Actually I’m retired. Call me Mick."

The woman waved it off as if it were of no moment. "Very well, Mick I am Arianne, Bal-Simba’s assistant. I wonder if perhaps you could help me."

TWENTY-THREE ENTER THE DWARVES

Arianne growled in frustration and tossed her pen aside.

Trouble?" Bal-Simba asked mildly, looking up from his own work.

This plan of Gilligan’s makes my head hurt."

"And mine as well," the big wizard agreed. "

"Tis said that simple plans work best. But here we must have complexity if we are to attain our goal." He gestured at the glowing letters. "So:"

This is far more complex than anything we have ever attempted and it must all work perfectly."

Bal-Simba nodded. "Complex indeed. But then we face a situation of unprecedented complexity. Indeed, I cannot see how matters could become more complicated." He was about to go on, but Brian came dashing into the room. Then he remembered his lessons, pulled himself up short, squared his shoulders and pulled his tunic straight.

"Excuse me, My Lord, but the seneschal says there are a hundred dwarves here to see you."

Arianne cocked an eyebrow at the big wizard, who shook his head and rose from his seat. "Foretelling the future was never my strong point," he said, and sighed.

Either Brian had understated the case or Wulfram miscounted. There were actually 128 dwarves waiting in the great hall of the Wizards’ Keep. All adult males, since women and children never left the dwarven holds. All of them armored in knee-length bymies of chain or heavy leather, all of them wearing steel caps and all of them with their traditional dwarfish battle axes strapped to their backs. Since their round shields of iron-rimmed oak were slung over the axes and since the axes were tied fast to their baldrics by peace bonds, it was obvious this was not a war party. Just what it was, Bal-Simba and the other wizards weren’t sure. Dwarves seldom left their delvings and never in human memory had so many been seen at the Wizards’ Keep.

As Bal-Simba entered the hall behind Wulfram the dwarves arrayed themselves in parallel lines with an older dwarf at their head. From his position and stance, Bal-Simba took him to be their leader, a notion confirmed by the circlet of red gold fitted around his steel cap.

"I am Tosig Longbeard, King of the dwarves," the head dwarf proclaimed as soon as the wizard gestured for him to speak "Here to reclaim my rightful property." Bal-Simba looked blank. "Property, Your Majesty?"

"The sword Blind Fury, the greatest treasure of my tribe."

"Ah," the giant wizard said softly. This was beginning to make sense.

"My idiot kinsman stole it from our treasury. We have traced him here. Now give me the sword-and while you’re about it you can turn over my kinsman for punishment as well."

"I am afraid neither is here," Bal-Simba said. "They were here but they have departed."

From the way the news left Tosig Longbeard unmoved, Bal-Simba suspected he already knew that neither the sword nor the dwarf were at the Wizards’ Keep.

"Where?" he demanded, gimlet-eyed. "Where did they go?"

"The dungeons beneath the City of Night. Your kinsman-Glandurg?-wished to accompany our folk on a hazardous mission there."

"A quest, eh? For what treasure?"

"No treasure, just great danger and a mighty foe."

Bal-Simba didn’t need a mind reading spell to see Tosig didn’t believe that. Not even his moronic nephew would go charging into someone else’s dungeon unless there was treasure involved. The fact that the humans denied it only meant they didn’t intend to share if they could avoid it. To the dwarf long that was perfectly reasonable, but it only made him more determined to get part of the loot.

"We will follow him, then."

"That may be a trifle difficult," Bal-Simba said mildly. "The lord of the dungeons has closed the path to any who try to enter. Not even dwarfish magic may force the way, I fear." For a moment wizard and dwarf regarded each other.

"Well?" Tosig Longbeard said finally.

"I beg Your Majesty’s pardon?"

"Well what’s the rest of it? You wouldn’t tell me that for no reason and you obviously don’t expect me to pay for that information. So you want something. What?"

Bal-Simba didn’t even try to disabuse him of the notion they were bargaining. The dwarf wouldn’t have believed him, and besides:

"No bargain, but I do have a suggestion. Soon we shall attempt a stratagem to force our way into the dungeons. If you would care to accompany us, we would be glad for your help. Meanwhile, please stay with us in the Wizards’ Keep as our guests."

There was silence again while the king considered. "Very well," he said at last.

"If you do not delay too long we will combine our forces to breach this fortress and recover our property." will have the seneschal prepare accommodations."

"We will camp amongst the trees across the river," Tosig Longbeard said. "This whole place stinks of dragons." With that he turned and marched between the ranks of his followers and out of the hall.

"A hundred dwarves," Bal-Simba murmured once the last mailed warrior had followed his king out of the hall. "And the Sparrow thought he had trouble with only one."

"A hundred and a score and eight," Arianne corrected. "Do you think they will be much help?"

Bal-Simba sighed. "I told you I fared poorly at predicting the future, Lady. I only know they will do less damage to our cause if they go with us rather than preceding us on their own and stirring up the Enemy." He eyed the door where the dwarves had passed out "Probably," he added.

TWENTY-FOUR OPERATION WINTER STORM

Although not bound to their tunnels, the dwarves were uncomfortable away from them. Clearly Tosig’s men would rather be back at their shafts and forges than preparing to battle an unknown enemy half a world away. Still, dwarves are stoic by nature and none has ever faulted them for lack of courage.

There was snow in the wood, piled up under the trees, and a skin of ice lay on all the ponds and streams. The dwarves didn’t seem to notice as they bustled about, felling trees and digging into the frozen soil to make crude dugouts. Before the sun completed its short journey to the horizon, a section of the wood had taken on the appearance of a semi-permanent and none-too-uncomfortable camp. Tosig Longbeard was standing in front of a camp fire, overseeing the last of the work and warming himself when Durgrim, captain of the dwarven guard and his military second-in-command, approached him.

"We are almost done with the sleeping holes," Durgrim told his king. "Another day-tenth and the last of them will be done and the evening meal will be ready." Tosig Longbeard grunted assent. Durgrim paused, judging the king’s temper.

"Your Majesty," he said slowly, "I have been thinking about this, and the place on the Southern Continent where we are bound."

"Speak your mind," invited the dwarf long in a tone that suggested his lieutenant had better be careful about what he said.

"Even before mortals started using it, the place had an evil reputation," the other dwarf told him. "I am sure human occupation has not improved it."

"Unsurprising if it were so. You have an alternative to propose?"

Durgrim paused again, obviously gathering his courage. "Your majesty, can we not simply bargain with this enemy, buy the sword back?"

Tosig Longbeard glared at him. "Do you think I’m simple? I’ve tried that already. Whatever this creature is, it will not treat with us at all. Besides," he continued, the anger leaving his voice, "even if he would deal the price would undoubtedly be too high."

The dwarf long scowled back into the fire. "No, there is no help for it. With or without the mortals we must penetrate this place to recover the sword." Being dwarves and with dwarves’ careful sense of property rights-not to mention their greed for treasure-it never occurred to either of them to simply leave the sword in the Enemy’s hands.

Charlie brought the Colt around in a wide, easy turn. He lined up on the white expanse between the rows of leafless trees and settled to the snowy earth lightly as thistledown. The big biplane rolled perhaps a hundred feet across the field before it stopped.

Malus stood at the edge of the field, blowing on his hands to warm them. As the plane rolled to a stop he crunched across the snow to meet Charlie.

"Still feels a little funny on the controls," Charlie told the tubby little wizard as soon as he stepped down from the door. "I don’t think you’ve got the center of lift quite right over the wings yet."

"I can adjust the spell again," Malus said.

"No, it’ll fry fine the way it is. If it ain’t too broke, then don’t go fixing it, that’s my motto."

"Is there aught else then?"

"Yeah, one thing. The propeller. It doesn’t rotate." Malus spread his hands. "It is not necessary that it should spin. Magic now moves your craft through the air."

Charlie looked at him. "Just do me a favor. Make it spin."

Gilligan was in the "war room," going over the details of the air operation and the scheduling software with Jerry when Bal-Simba entered.

"Merry meet, My Lord. How goes the plan?"

"Well enough, I guess," Gilligan said with a sigh.

"What is worrying you?"

"You mean in general? Nearly everything." He grinned. "That’s part of my job."

"Specifically, then."

"Well-" He hesitated. "Has it occurred to you that this might be another trap? That the whole purpose of this thing might be to lure as many of us as it can into those caves so it can snap us up?"

Bal-Simba’s smile had no warmth. "Constantly. It is our greatest fear. Yet we have little choice. We must strike soon and with all our strength or this thing will overwhelm us. We have taken what precautions we can, but this still remains the best course of action." He looked at Mick. "Is there aught else?" Mick sighed. "Charlie. He isn’t a programmer, he isn’t a magician and I don’t think he’s ever really flown in a combat environment before. He’s going to have a lot to do up there. Do you think he’ll be able to handle it all?" Jerry looked at Mick and smiled. "Taj and I have rigged up a custom user interface to help him."

It was getting colder. Except for occasional spots like the hot springs or the lava tunnels, the caves had never been really warm but now they were getting more and more frigid. Wiz could see his breath in puffs before his face and he hugged his cloak tighter about him to try to keep out the frigid chill. He tried not to think how hungry he was. Since their discovery that they were cut off, the group had been on "halt rations" that had grown steadily skimpier. Glandurg was not eating at all and Wiz suspected that half of Danny’s ration was going to June.

They were even short on monsters. It had been nearly two days since the last attack. Wiz wondered if that meant they were headed in the wrong direction, but the new Moira seeker was pointing resolutely the same way.

Wiz went around the corner and came face to face with a cloaked, hooded figure. He drew back and Malkin’s rapier sprang free before they realized they were seeing a reflection. Motioning Malkin to stay on guard, Wiz advanced, staff ready, toward the mirror. As he drew closer he saw it was no mirror. Instead there was a rough reflective coating on the rocky wall of the tunnel. Wiz touched the glistening surface. "Ice," he called back to the others. "Ice under a volcano."

"Perhaps our enemy likes it cold," Danny suggested as the group came close. Malkin arched an eyebrow. "Makes it easier to keep the zombies fresh, no doubt." Wiz drew his hand under his cloak to warm it. "Or maybe it just makes things more uncomfortable for us." He looked around "Well, let’s get going. They say exercise helps keep you warm."

There was more ice as they went along. Here it glistened as a thin film on the rocky walls, there it made a treacherous coating over the floor of the tunnel. Occasionally there would be a solid vein of ice, filling a crack in the stone like some strange glistening mineral. Now the air was so cold the adventurers could see their breath before them.

Glandurg seemed unfazed, but the others kept then-cloaks wrapped tight around them. Still the cold seemed to steal through to sap their very strength and leave them weak and shivering.

Nor did the tunnel cooperate. It seemed as though every few steps they had to crawl over a pile of frozen debris or climb a slope so steep they must go on all fours or squeeze between unrelenting walls of rock. Places with level footing were few and far between. Even without the ice and cold it would have been difficult. With them it was exhausting. They saw and heard nothing for the rest of the day, save the occasional drip, drip, drip of not-quite-frozen water. Still, their senses were alert and straining and that added to their fatigue. Malkin was on watch, staring out into the dark, thiefs senses alert. She neither turned nor moved as Danny came up behind her, but he knew she sensed he was there.

"Anything?"

She didn’t turn, only shook her head slightly.

With a slight scrape he slid in beside her.

"How do you stay warm like that?"

Malkin flicked a bit of a smile. "I don’t."

"I can’t sleep," Danny said softly.

Malkin nodded, but said nothing.

"Malkin," he said at last, "do you think we’re going to be able .to rescue Moira?"

"That’s what we’re here for. That and to settle some scores with this thing." Danny gathered his courage. "Yeah, but do you think we’re going to be able to do it?"

"Are you so sure she wants to be rescued?" Malkin asked slowly.

"Of course Moira wants to be rescued."

"Moira herself might, but this thing has only Moira’s body. The will is the Enemy’s. I am not sure it will turn her loose that easily. The Enemy went through a great deal of trouble to get her. He obviously had some purpose."

"Yeah. Bait."

Malkin nodded, eyes never leaving the corridor. "Perhaps that too. But I think Moira, or Moira’s body, plays a greater role in the Enemy’s plans than mere bait."

"What are you getting at?"

"That we may not be able to rescue her. But I do not think we can afford to leave her here."

"Jesus," Danny breathed. "That’s awful! Have you talked to Wiz about this?"

"He has problems enough and this is one he isn’t going to think clearly upon." She turned to face him. "But we must think upon it, and decide what we’re to do, should it come to that."

She turned her head to face down the dark passage and neither said anything for several minutes.

"That’s a hell of a choice," Danny said at last.

"Hard choices must still be made."

"And you think we:"

"I doubt Wiz will be ready to make such a decision when we find her. Do not try to decide now. But think about it. And think about how to do what we must do if it comes to that"

"It wont come to that," the young programmer said firmly. "Wiz will find another way, or I will, or someone."

Malkin’s expression did not change. "I hope you are right."

It could not be said to be anyplace, really, for it had no sense of self as we know it. There was a nexus, but its senses were spread over more than a continent. There was no feeling for where it left off and others began, because in a very real sense there was no "other"-there was only that which had not yet been absorbed and turned to its purposes.

It had discovered the strategy long ago, in the brutal battles that had led to its supremacy. Better to absorb and adapt than to destroy, to incorporate and use rather than smash. It was a superior strategy and even if it had the gift of introspection it would not have troubled about the consequences. This frozen corpse contained magical knowledge it could incorporate. With that came a burning hatred seared soul-deep, a hatred that set it on its present course, but that was of no moment. Later the gleanings of a soulless husk far away reinforced that animosity as well as adding knowledge. That too was of no moment. They were simply things to be absorbed and put to use. That was enough. Wiz awoke still groggy, with an ache in his head and someone’s foot in his face. From the way the rest of the pile shifted and grumbled he got the feeling they weren’t in any better shape.

"Hmf," Danny grumped as he disentangled himself from the pile. "Another day, another monster."

"Not many of those," Malkin said.

Danny quirked a smile. "Hell, I even miss the lobster."

"I’m not so sure I’d go that far," Wiz said.

"I would," Malkin put in. "We could eat for a week off that bug."

Wiz really wasn’t quite ready to go that far, but he could understand the sentiment.

Carefully he measured the grain and a little of the vegetables into the cooking pot and added ice. Then he gestured and a flame sprang up among the rocks. He set the pot with the ice on it to melt. He crouched over it, hands extended to soak up the warmth.

"That will tell the Enemy where we are," Malkin said, eyeing the magic flame and not quite protesting.

The Enemy probably knows where we are already," Wiz growled "We’ll be in a lot better shape to face him if we’re warm, rested and fed"

After breakfast the group continued on. Wiz was right. If conditions were no better this day, at least they felt better for the hot meal.

Wiz had Danny take the lead with Glandurg behind him. Actually that meant Danny and June were in the lead and Glandurg following them. Malkin brought up the rear and Wiz stayed in the center of the formation for a change.

Just before the break for the noon meal Wiz pulled Malkin aside. "I want to talk to you."

The tall thief saw his expression and nodded. "You heard last night?" He gave a tight little smile. "I don’t sleep real well when I’m cold." Malkin cocked her head, waiting.

"I’ve been thinking about it ever since." Wiz drew a deep breath. "I just wanted to tell you, I think you’re right. I think we can still get Moira out, but if we can’t:"He stopped, gulped another breath and went on. "If we can’t I want you to know I understand if you do: what has to be done."

"You want us to take action, then?"

"I know that thing about shooting your own dog, but I can’t" He tried to smile again and the effect was ghastly under the bluish magic light. "Just don’t do it unless you’re absolutely sure, okay?’

Malkin nodded slowly, not trusting herself to speak.

"Now let’s catch up with the others."

"He heard us," Malkin whispered to Danny later when she contrived to get him and June off to one side.

"And?-

"He does not like it but he sees the force of the argument. He only asks that we do it should it become necessary."

"I’ve been thinking about this too," the young programmer said. "I think maybe there’s an alternative." .

"If there is, well and good," Malkin told him. "But we do not dare leave Moira, or Moira’s body, here."

"They say you’re coming with us."

Mick looked up from his planning software to see Jerry and Taj standing before him. There’s nothing more useless than a staff officer when the battle’s joined. So yeah, I’m going with you."

"We figured you’d need a weapon," Jerry said, handing him the box.

Mick opened it and inside was a military-issue Beretta semi-automatic pistol with a couple of clips of ammunition and a shoulder holster like the one he had worn in the attack on Caer Mort.

Mick slipped into the shoulder harness and hefted the pistol. "Thanks, guys. But didn’t you say things like this won’t work in this world?"

"Things like that work just fine," Taj said. "It’s guns that don’t work here."

"What he means is, it isn’t what it looks like," Jerry explained. "It’s actually a magic weapon that shoots lightning bolts. It just looks like a pistol."

"We could make it look like a Star Trek phaser if you’d prefer," Taj offered.

"Or something really wicked."

"I think I’ll stick with this, thanks." Gilligan slipped the weapon into his shoulder holster.

"Anyway," Taj said. "If you’ve got a few minutes we thought you might want to come down and watch the takeoff."

Mick looked at the spreadsheet hanging over the map. There were still things to do, but he realized that most of it was make-work. The ball was about to start rolling and things were moving increasingly out of the war room and into the real world.

"Yeah," he said, rising from his desk, "yeah, I’d like that."

The three made their way down into the depths of the castle and into the echoing dimness of the dragon aerie. For Mick it was the first time he had been on the aerie floor since Karin brought him here the first day. He felt a pang at the realization.

Sitting in the middle of the aerie was Charlie’s AN-2 Colt, newly equipped with a top turret, tail gunner’s position and with what looked like science-fiction machine guns sticking out on the sides. The dragons eyed the newcomer and shifted and bridled uncomfortably. Clearly they didn’t like this addition to their midst.

That thing looks like a bomber," Gilligan said. "A B AN-2?"

"Actually it’s a more like an EW AN-2," Taj said. "Except it’s magic not electronic warfare, so I guess it’s an MW AN-2."

"Why do I get the feeling this is never going to make Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft?’

"Different world?" Taj suggested.

"Here he comes," Jerry said. "And it looks like he’s got his, uh, user interface with him."

Charlie stepped between the looming monsters and marched out to the group of waiting wizards and programmers. Trailing behind him were five bat-eared demons.

"My crew," he said to the group.

The first in line was a fresh-faced demon in aviator sunglasses, an officer’s cap with a thousand-mission crush and a brown cowhide flight jacket with a Flying Tigers Blood Chit on the back and an Eighth Air Force patch on the sleeve. "Gerry O’Demon. My co-pilot"

Jerry groaned and threw an anguished look at Taj, who merely spread his hands and shrugged.

The next demon was short and slovenly with an unshaven chin and beady little eyes that never seemed to look at anyone straight on.

"That’s Joe, my tailgunner."

Next in line was an older demon wearing a baseball cap, coveralls liberally smeared with grease and chewing on a cigar stub that was disreputable even by demon standards.

"Kelly. He’s my crew chief and waist gunner."

Next was a young demon in a fleece-lined leather jacket, baseball cap and a particularly goofy grin. This is Sparks. He’s radioman and handles the other waist gun."

Finally there was a slender, rangy demon wearing a leather flight jacket and a battered Stetson.

Tex here’s the turret gunner."

With introductions made, Charlie waved his "crew" toward the airplane. "Okay, boys, saddle up and let’s ride."

"User interface, huh?" Mick said to Taj as they watched Charlie and the demons swarm over the plane doing last-minute checks.

"At least it ain’t Windows 95," Jerry said.

The best interface is the one that best fits the user," Taj added. "Can you think of a better interface for this job?"

At last Charlie and the demons were aboard and in position. Charlie slid open the cockpit window and signaled thumbs-up to the Flight Master, who controlled operations from the aerie.

As he had been taught, the Flight Master waved to Charlie to indicate all was ready. Charlie responded with a one-finger salute. The Flight Master turned to the door, dropped to one knee and brought his stiff arm down pointing at the entrance. On that signal Malus raised his staff and the big biplane shot the length of the aerie and out into the open air like an F-14 coming off the deck of a carrier. The cavern erupted into a deafening chorus of roars as the dragons protested an unfamiliar flying thing in their airspace.

As the grooms and riders fought to keep the dragons under control the plane disappeared below the rim of the entrance for a heart-stopping instant and then appeared again, climbing smoothly For altitude.

"Come, My Lords and Ladies," said Bal-Simba. "We have our own work to do." With a final glance at the rapidly vanishing speck in the center of the patch of blue, Gilligan turned and followed the group out of the aerie.

"Where’s your girlfriend?" Taj asked as they climbed the stone steps back to the main keep.

"She left a little while ago," Mick said shortly.

Deep beneath the ground the pale queen sat upon her ink-black throne. Light there was none, nor sound. Neither was needful.

Part of her was in this dark hall and other parts were in a thousand different places, sensing, observing and here and there acting. All of that was part of the dark queen just as she was part of all of it.

She could feel the pulse of the earth and the putt of the tides. She could sense the currents and eddies of magic which flowed through this place. She could sense her belly ripening even as desires ripene. All were good. All would come to fruition in the fullness of time.

The pale queen knew neither impatience nor haste. Only the pattern, changing, unfolding, becoming. That was all there was and all there needed to be.

TWENTY-FIVE THE FLIGHT OF THE OLD CROW

The sea was gray, the sky was pale, dear blue and all was quiet. Too quiet. I shoulda had the wizard do something about engine noise, Charlie thought as the plane hissed through the air. The AN-2 was as rugged as a steel I-beam, but her Russian designers hadn’t spared any attention for non-essentials like soundproofing. Flying a Colt and being able to hear himself think was a new experience for Charlie. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

He flicked the intercom switch.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,

And wee’lll alllll stayyy freeee.

None of the demons could sing worth a damn and that wasn’t stopping any of them. In fact they’d been singing constantly since they launched out of the aerie several hours before. They’d started with "Remember Pearl Harbor" and worked their way through a medley of World War II patriotic songs, including a rousing number called "Bomben auf England" that Charlie was sure never graced the messes of the Eighth Air Force. When again. It wasn’t such a large repertoire and Charlie had decided long ago he preferred the unnatural silence of the cockpit to the racket in the intercom.

Gilligan leaned over the map and put his fists on the table. "Okay, their forces are deploying. We’ve got six, eight, it looks like about ten squadrons of dragons moving into range of Charlie."

"What is Dushmann doing?" asked Kuznetsov.

Gilligan looked puzzled.

"The enemy," the Russian explained. " ’Dushmann’ means the Enemy."

"In the air over the city, not much. There are only scattered indications from the City of Night. It looks as if they only have a few sentries up." He looked over at Bal-Simba. "I’d bet he’s got forces still on the ground and ready to launch. But the ones that are homing in on Charlie are probably out, of the battle. They can’t get back in time."

Moira thrust her scaly head between Gilligan and Kuznetsov. "Has Charlie been warned?"

"He knows they’re there," the American said dryly.

Everyone watched silently as the waves of red acts swept toward the lone green diamond.

"Six o’clock high," Tailgunner Joe sang out over the intercom. "Bogies. Multiple. They’re going for a beam pass."

"I got "em," Sparks shouted. "Here they come."

Charlie twisted in the seat to catch sight of the attackers. The undead dragons weren’t as smooth as the ones he had seen at the castle. Their formation was ragged, they tended to slew in the turn and their flight was stiff. But all that only made them more menacing. He counted at least six as they swept around in a flat turn to come in on the Colt broadside. On they came, rising and falling slightly in the air currents, growing larger and more sinister as they bored in for the kill. Charlie saw the skeletal riders rise in their saddles to draw their great iron bows.

Just when it seemed they were too close to matter, Sparks opened up with the waist gun. The undead riders and their zombie mounts were immune to death arrows and hard to stop with dragon fire. They would have laughed at .50 caliber machine gun bullets. Energy bolts were another matter.

Lances of lightning stabbed toward the attackers. The afterimage burned purple in Charlie’s vision of a dragon arcing its neck back almost on top of its rider in a lambent nimbus of brilliance. Then Tex joined in from the top turret and the brightness became too much to bear. Charlie blinked and shook his head, trying to see. The instrument panel was lost in the dark spots swirling across his vision. He drew a gasping breath and nearly choked on the ozone. The flat crack-crack-crack of the lightning bolts told him Sparks was still firing. Suddenly it was quiet again. "Eight in, eight down," Sparks yelled into the intercom. Charlie looked out the side window and saw two splashes in the ocean below. One of them had a burnt relic that might once have been a wine disappearing at its center.

Back in the cockpit Gerry O’Demon, his copilot, was holding the controls straight and level as if nothing had happened.

"Good work, son," Charlie said into the mike.

"Don’t get cocky," came Joe’s growl from the tail position. "We got two more groups on our six."

Gerry leaned forward and squinted out the windshield. Twelve o’clock high!" the demon called. "Multiples. Three squadrons at least. I think more behind those." Charlie’s eyes weren’t as good as the demon’s but when he looked hard he saw them too. He craned his neck left and right seeking more bogies. He didn’t see any but there was an ugly looking thunderhead boiling up a couple of miles off to the left.

Normally Charlie would have avoided a storm cell like a temperance lecture. But the three squadrons of zombies were coming straight at them. He heard the crack-crack-crack as the squadrons behind them came within range of Tailgunner Joe’s weapon.

"Really sporty, huh?" chirped his co-pilot.

Tu madre," Charlie muttered. Then he kicked the rudder hard, shoved the throttle to the firewall and ran for the clouds for all he was worth.

Far above, the watching demons scanned everything that came within their purview. They were without emotion or even intelligence. They simply collected sense impressions and transmitted the information through intermediary demons back to the Wizards’ Keep, where it was processed and displayed on the magic map in the war room.

Moira thrust her scaly head over Gilligan’s shoulders. "It appears that Charlie has destroyed some of his attackers."

"He’s got firepower in that plane," Jerry said.

"Every one he takes out is one less we have to worry about," Kuznetsov added. Gilligan peered deeper into the tank. There were a lot of red dots closing in on the lone green diamond. "From the looks of it I’d say we’re going to have plenty to worry about anyway."

"Are we ready for the next phase?" asked Bal-Simba.

Gilligan looked at Kuznetsov and both men shook their heads. "We want them committed as fully as possible before we spring our next little surprise on them."

"A while more," Kuznetsov said.

Gilligan watched the battle develop and tried not to think about Karin and what she was doing.

TWENTY-SIX THE EXECUTIONER

No sea birds, Karin thought, scanning the gray sky above the gray-green sea. She spared a glance down at the crag. No nests and no signs of them. Not even the deposits of whitewash left by birds using the rocks for fishing lookouts. The place probably smelled better for the lack, but it did not make it any less forbidding.

The Executioner’s attraction was its geography and topography, not natural beauty. There were several reefs and bars within a two-hour dragon flight of the ruined City of Night, none of them big enough or high enough above water to be called islands. But the Executioner had one thing the others lacked: Hiding places. The volcanic rock was laced with crevices, blowholes, fissures and pumice caves that could keep a dragon or two and their riders safe from eyes in the sky.

Karin and her partner had been here for almost two days now, keeping concealed and waiting for the signal. Karin hugged the jagged rock and stared out over the sullen ocean, scanning from horizon to horizon and back again for any speck that might be an approaching dragon. But the sky was as empty as the sea. Finally satisfied, she twisted on the narrow ledge and waved to her companion below. Senta was a small, dark woman who was unusual in being both a skilled magician and a dragon rider. Karin was with her as her wingman and to use her scouting skills to keep them undetected and out of trouble until they had done what they came for.

I wonder where Mick: But she pushed the thought from her mind and concentrated on the business at hand.

Down below, back under a lava overhang, Stigi and Senta’s dragons were restive. They didn’t like being on the ground when there were enemies about, and the undead dragons made them nervous besides. Well, that was fine with Karin. She was nervous too. As soon as they completed their job here she would be only too glad to be back in the air and winging her way home.

Back in the Wizards’ Keep, the command group around the tank watched in satisfaction. The diversion had worked perfectly. The Enemy had thrown almost all his forces north, out over the Freshened Sea. Now those forces were fully committed and it would take time for the Enemy to recall them. Too much time. Of course that also meant that one lone biplane was the focus for every undead dragon and rider the Enemy had in his first wave, and he had a lot of them. Gilligan looked at the clocks on the walls. "Okay, initiate phase two." He stared into the tank to watch the aerial ballet he had choreographed unfold. He tried not to think of Karin.

Karin spared another glance for Senta, standing now on the black rock and lashed by ocean spray. Now the signal had come and at last, at last they could do something besides wait.

Senta reached into her pouch and pulled out one of Taj’s Origami dragons. She placed it in the palm of her hand, holding it against the wind with a curled little finger. She spoke a spell, blew on the bit of folded parchment and tossed it into the air with a cry of "oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh." As soon as it left her hand it began to grow and change. Now there was a dragon and rider swooping up past Karin to circle over their heads. Even this close the illusion was well-nigh perfect to Karin’s senses, right down to the rush of air on her face as the

"dragon" climbed past her. She only hoped it appeared as perfect to the Enemy. Below her Senta selected another parchment dragon and repeated the process, this time crying "oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-eye." The next was "oh-oh-oh-oh-eye-oh" and the one after that "oh-oh-oh-oh-eye-eye," just as the foreign wizard, the one they called Taj, had instructed her.

Origami after origami was tossed aloft to shapeshift into the seeming of a dragon and rider and join the circling throng above the rock. Finally the last of the sixty-four "dragons" was launched and named. With a wave of her wand and another one-word spell, she sent the group on its way. As one the dragons sorted themselves out into squadron Vs and climbed toward the south, a non-existent armada flying straight at the Enemy’s stronghold.

If Karin was impressed by the reality of the seemings, Senta was even more impressed by the magical skill behind them. Such ruses had long been common in battle, but they suffered a fatal flaw. A magician could not control more than one seeming at a time. True, such an illusion could appear to be an army or a horde of dragons, but magically it was all one unit, with but a single true name. A skilled magician could quickly detect the fact and even the greatest of wizards could only control a few such magical entities.

This group was different. Somehow by naming them as they had been named they had become part of an entity called "array," each separate, each with its own true name, yet all of them bound to perform collectively by a single spell. To Senta, this was high magic indeed.

She was still admiring her handiwork when Karin came sliding down the rock to join her.

"Perfect," the blond woman said. "Now let’s get out of here before the Enemy decides to investigate this place."

Senta looked after her creations winging south. "I wonder why they call them drones when they don’t make any noise at all?"

"Mick said:" Then she stopped, looking north. "Never mind that," Karin said flatly. "We’ve got a problem."

The other turned and saw a ragged line of black dots on the line where gray clouds met gray sea.

"Back under the rocks, quickly." Both women sprinted for the shelter of the crevice, hoping against hope that the zombies’ senses were as uncoordinated as their movements.

Had the seeming been detected so quickly? It had to be an accident, Karin told herself firmly as she pressed against the spray-wet rock. Only by chance had these undead been near at hand when Senta activated the seeming.

But chance or plan, it put them in a precarious situation. They were caught on the ground, outnumbered and perilously close to the Enemy’s base. If they were spotted:

From her recess in the rock she watched as the ragged V passed perhaps two dragon lengths above the tallest point on the reef, swinging around the crag in jerky precision. For a minute Karin thought the zombies had not seen them. Then one by one the zombie dragons peeled off and swooped back toward the island.

"Shit," Karin breathed and pressed further back against the rear of the overhang.

Gilligan watched the second wave of dummy dragons soar aloft from the Executioner and aim straight for the City of Night. Almost immediately he saw a few ragged dots rise from the city to meet the suddenly-appearing foe.

"Okay," he said. "They’re as fully committed as they’re going to get." He picked up the microphone connected to the communications crystal.

"Now," Gilligan said. Tora Tora Tora." In the back of his mind he wondered if it had been such a good idea to let Charlie pick the code names. Then he focused on the display to the exclusion of everything else.

Charlie was in the middle of a heck of a fight. There had been perhaps ten squadrons of zombie dragons launched against him and the survivors pressed then-attack ruthlessly.

Charlie put on a display of flying that would have been the hit of any air show-and gotten his license lifted immediately by the FAA. He hauled the big biplane around so tightly the whole frame shuddered, giving his gunners belly shots on three and four dragons at once. He dived for the sea and skimmed so low that the following dragons crashed into the waves. He zoomed for altitude and then hit his flaps far above the safe maximum speed so that his pursuers overshot him and fell to his turret gunner. He used every trick in the book and a few that never made it into the book.

The zombie attackers gave as good as they got and then some. Salvos of arrows struck the plane, without effect. The mechanical damage the iron arrows could do was minor and the plane itself was not complex enough to be killed by their death spells. Dragon fire was something else. In spite of the efforts of his gunners and Charlie’s frantic jinking, the swarm of dragons drew closer and closer, swirling in about him and diving on the aircraft to deliver gouts of fire. The cockpit was magically protected against dragon fire and there was no fuel on board, but the fire of even undead dragons is hotter than a flamethrower.

Finally it was all too much. Trailing flame in half-a-dozen places, the AN-2 went down in a flat spin. As the plane hit the water the magic link broke and the green diamond on the display winked out.

"I don’t suppose:" Moira said into the strained silence.

"We will do what we can," Bal-Simba said, "but I fear it is not much." He turned to issue orders to one of the Watchers.

The others continued to stare numbly into the inky water.

"I am sorry," Kuznetsov said at last.

"Don’t be," Jerry said quietly. "It was what he wanted." He looked into the still black water in the bowl. "Maybe more than he ever wanted anything in his life."

"At least it will not be in vain," Moira said. "He has taken us the first step. Now we will continue what he has begun."

"Your part approaches, Lady," Bal-Simba told her. The others have assembled in the great hall."

Gilligan nodded to the Chief Watcher. "You have the watch."

Erus inclined his head and stepped to the tank to watch and issue whatever further instructions might be necessary.

As he followed the others out the door Gilligan’s feelings were decidedly mixed. His training told him he was abandoning his post at a critical time, but his reason told him there was nothing more he could do. Unlike a controller in his own world he didn’t have the capability to shape the battle from here on out. The forces were launched and everything depended on the execution. Now he could go kick ass with impunity.

Gilligan wasn’t the introspective sort so it never occurred to him to wonder how much of his decision was reason and how much was the driving need to actually do something.

Perhaps fortunately, he was gone by the time the tank showed the zombies closing in on Karin and Senta.

Over the sea north of the City of Night a new battle was shaping up. The Enemy launched the last of its forces to meet the incoming squadrons.

The zombie squadrons bore north in ragged formation. These were the scrapings of the Enemy’s aerie and many of the dragons and riders were so badly damaged they could barely fly, much less maintain formation. Still, under command of their guiding intelligence they all climbed and circled as best they could. The League dragons came on in a smooth squadron weave. The defenders had height on them and the sun at their backs. Wings locked, they dove on the intruders. A blast of dragon fire and a spark went tumbling from the sky. Another blast and another scrap of burning parchment went fluttering seaward.

In quick succession they knocked a dozen more "dragons" from the sky, all scraps of parchment.

That was proof enough even for zombies. As one they turned away from the drones and ran for the City of Night.

It was already too late.

The dragon cavalry of the League had trickled south under a cloaking spell, giving wide berth to the City of Night. Now they swept in around the volcano and over the City of Night on its slopes. Wing on wing of dragons soared above the Enemy’s city and strafed anything that moved on the ground with bursts of dragon fire. The Enemy’s aeries were empty and no dragons rose to oppose them. The zombies that trickled south from the decoy missions arrived in dribs and drabs and were easily burned from the air by dragon fire.

The great hall was not merely full, it was jammed. The eight wizards who would send the storming party on its way were pushed back against the wall by the crush. Besides a twenty-foot dragon, most of the castle guard was mustered, armed and ready, and another dozen or so wizards were scattered among them. Mick Gilligan was toward the center with his new pistol. Taking up half the space was a knot of 127 dwarves gathered close around their long and as far from the dragon as they could manage.

Kuznetsov and Vastly came pushing through the crush to stand next to Gilligan. From somewhere the Russians had come up with powder blue berets, striped jerseys and fatigues in a pattern of camouflage that Mick found just a little disconcerting.

"Brings back old memories, eh?" Kuznetsov said as they positioned themselves. Around them the wizards raised their staffs and began to chant.

The Colt had sunk quickly, leaving only a small oil slick behind. Charlie had managed to launch the life raft before the plane disappeared, but with the zombie air force overhead Charlie had hidden under it rather than riding in it. The undead riders had made pass after pass on the bright yellow raft, tearing it to waterlogged shreds with their arrows. Then, as one, they had wheeled and headed south, leaving Charlie alone in the water.

As the last of the enemy dragons disappeared into the clouds, Charlie inflated his life jacket and surveyed his situation. He was hundreds of miles from land and already the chill of the water was starting to creep through his exposure suit. He had no food, no radio and nothing with which to call for help.

"Son," he said to the empty ocean. "It don’t get any more sporty than this." Then he saw dorsal fins slicing toward him.

TWENTY-SEVEN SNEAK ATTACK

The whole purpose of the operation was simply to distract the Enemy for just this instant. Distraction enough so it wouldn’t notice that Moira was arriving with company. Or what that company was carrying.

Although the Enemy was naturally multi-tasking, each new assault had spread it thinner and thinner. From the very beginning Watchers had been scrutinizing parts of it, judging its reactions, looking for signs of slowdown and confusion. When they came, when Bal-Simba judged the time was right, a dozen wizards struck against the Enemy’s defenses to push the attackers through.

They were in an enormous echoing room in total darkness. Glow lights floated up from a dozen wizards simultaneously and the group realized they were standing in a gigantic limestone cavern. Even with a dozen lights the illumination barely reached to the edges of the room and threw eerie shadows into the parts it didn’t quite penetrate.

According to plan the group divided up. Following separate magic detectors, Moira, Bal-Simba and half the guardsmen went one way, Jerry, Taj, the Russians and the rest of the guards went another. The dwarves formed into a column and marched off in their own direction.

"How do you think they will do?" Jerry asked the guardsman nearest him as they looked after the dwarves.

The man rubbed his chin where his chain mail coif met his jawline. "Either turn and run at the first opportunity or break off and start looting."

"Well then?"

The guardsman shrugged "So we send them off independent. Can’t hurt, should draw some of the Enemy off us." He paused, considering. They may even do some damage."

"I still don’t like this," Taj said to Jerry as the other parties moved off.

"Neither do we, but we don’t have much time to search. This way we have a better chance of finding either Moira’s body or Wiz and his group before the Enemy can seriously oppose us."

"Besides," Kuznetsov said, "this will confuse Dushmann. If we move quickly," he added significantly.

Terry took the hint, checked his homing crystal and ordered his group to move out down a side passage.

"Sharp lookout now," Tosig Longbeard commanded. "And mind those side rooms. They might have something in them."

As the humans scattered in response to their magic detectors, the dwarves worked through the dungeons more methodically, checking each room and nook for j valuables. Thus they moved more slowly and were closer to the arrival point when the Enemy’s first counter-attack struck.

"Something’s coming," Durgrim told his King.

"Sound the recall," Tosig ordered and looked around him.

It wasn’t an ideal situation. Rather than being in a snug tunnel, the dwarves were in another large room where the enemy could come at them from all sides.

"Light," the dwarf long commanded, and the blackness of the cavern gave way to the twilight gloom dwarves prefer to daylight.

As the last of the dwarves scurried back to the safety of their fellows, Tosig’s breath caught in his throat. From all sides ragged lines of shambling, twitching undead warriors were converging on the little band of dwarves.

Against human foes it might have worked. But dwarves are tougher than mortals and bonny fighters beside.

"Steady the shield wall," Tosig bellowed "Here they come."

As if by instinct, the dwarves crowded into a tight circle two-deep in the middle of the cavern. Those in front dropped to one knee with their round shields before them. The rear rank shrugged their shields off their arms and stood behind the protection of their comrades’ shield wall with both hands on their axe shafts.

Heedless of their opponent’s new formation, the undead charged. There was no sound save the scuffling of feet on the cavern floor and the breathing of the dwarves. Soundlessly the zombies lurched forward and soundlessly they struck. Then the cavern erupted in the clamor of steel on steel and dwarven battle cries as the undead warriors hit the 128-dwarf Cuisinart.

The zombies might be already dead and hence unkillable, but there are certain practical problems in attacking when one’s arms have been lopped off at the shoulder or one’s head is rolling across the floor. Further, zombies’ muscle control is notoriously poor and this handicaps them in hand-to-hand combat. The first rank of dwarves was safe, crouched beneath their shields. The second could swing their axes with full force, protected yet unencumbered. About the only weapons that could reach over the shield wall to strike the axe bearers were spears and halberds. But as soon as a polearm extended over the shield wall, the shield dwarves would reach up with their axes and hook it, immobilizing weapon and wielder and leaving both open to a counter-stroke by the axe dwarves.

Not that it stopped the zombies. Whole or hacked up they continued to come on in deathly silence, pulling themselves forward to the attack with whatever limbs they had left Again and again they pressed forward and again and again they were cut into ever-smaller pieces.

Finally, when the last zombie had been chopped into pieces too small to be dangerous, the attack stopped.

Tosig Longbeard peered into the darkness, seeking other foes. He was breathing heavily and the gold crown upon his helm was battered and scarred. Already those warriors with healing skills were tending to their comrades’ wounds.

"Casualties?" He did not turn to look at his men.

"Six wounded," Durgrim told him. "Four will be able to walk once the healers finish with them. Two we must carry."

"Well enough then. Anything else about?"

"Nothing I can sense."

The dwarf long hawked and spat upon the still-quivering flesh of their late foes. "Pfagh! Animated corpses. These humans become ever more troublesome." His second-in-command gestured at the pile of bodies strewn about them. "Human these were. Yet I am unconvinced a human animated them. The magic was wrong." Tosig rubbed his chin. This is a matter to be thought upon. Meanwhile," his voice rose so all his troop could hear, "stand up and prepare to march! But carefully now. We know not what else we may find in this place."

The magic detector tuned to Wiz led Jerry, Taj and his group down a side passage, through a series of natural caverns and finally to an iron-bound oak door that led off the side of a tunnel.

Jerry pressed his ear to the door and listened.

The wizard behind him, a young man named Elias, checked the magic detector around his neck. "There is nothing in there."

"Yeah! Jerry hissed. "Well, that ’nothing’ is breathing awfully heavy." Elias frowned and tapped his detector on his palm.

Keeping his back to the wall, Jerry reached out and pushed on the door. It creaked, but it swung open smoothly, showing only darkness beyond. Now they could all hear the hoarse, heavy breathing.

"What do you think it is?" Taj whispered.

"I dunno," Jerry whispered back, but it’s cloaked, shielded and probably nasty." Taj regarded the door. "So, do we go in or not?"

"It would be better if we sent something in ahead of us." He brightened. "And I’ve got just the thing."

A quick call for an Emac, a muttered spell and suddenly there was a fuzzy pink mechanical rabbit standing before them. The rabbit was wearing dark glasses and carrying a bass drum. But he also had a boonie rag tied around his head and an awesomely wicked looking weapon slung across his back The rabbit did a quick half turn to orient himself and marched into the dark room, beating the drum. Four beats later, the drum was drowned out by the roars, growls, snarls and liquid sucking sounds coming from the room. Then the corridor echoed and rang with gunfire and explosions until the watchers clapped their hands over their ears to save their hearing.

Then there was silence. After a few seconds the pink mechanical rabbit appeared out of the smoke. He blew the smoke from the barrel of his weapon, slung it back on his back, adjusted his drum and marched off down the corridor, beating his drum.

A quick peek around the corner showed there was nothing left alive in the room, although there were enough miscellaneous body parts to stock a good-sized zoo-or a terrific nightmare.

"Jeez," said Taj, as he stepped over something that might have been a tentacle and avoided a taloned foot that was still twitching, "what do you suppose this thing was?"

Jerry looked around. "As a friend of mine likes to say, never ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to. Now come on. Let’s see if we can find the others."

Well you wanted to the a fucking hero, Charlie thought. Somehow his definition of a hero’s death had never included being eaten alive by sharks. He could just give up, exhale and sink beneath the water, but natural orneriness in him kept him from taking the easy way out.

Damn! Why couldn’t he have gone down with his plane? At least I won’t end up a zombie.

The fins drew nearer and Charlie braced himself for what must come. Closer and closer they scythed until he could see the wet sheen on the black flesh of the fins and the smooth ripple of water before them. Barely two yards from him the nearest fin disappeared beneath the waves and Charlie gasped in anticipation. Something broke water in front of him. After a second he opened his eyes to find himself facing a very unsharklike snout with the mouth pulled back in a toothy grin.

"Hello," the dolphin squeaked. Behind the first one, two other dolphins had their heads out of the water.

Charlie goggled. It’s a damn good thing I’m already wet, was his mad first thought. Then he laughed in pure relief.

"Go home?" squeaked the dolphin. "Go home now?"

Charlie doubled over laughing and got a nose full of water. He choked and sputtered and the dolphins moved in to support him under the arms.

"Goddamn. You guys are Air-Sea Rescue, right?"

"Go home," the dolphin repeated.

"Okay, son, just lead the way."

Supported and pushed along by the dolphins, Charlie headed north, toward the lands of man.

"Hey, do any of you boys know:" He started to sing. "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition :"

None of the dolphins did of course, but they were apt pupils and not in the least put off by Charlie’s cracked baritone. By the end of the first mile they had joined in with their mosquito-buzz voices.

": praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, And we’ll allll stayyy freeee." The Executioner’s rock ledges were narrow and slippery and the zombies were clumsy. The second dragon misjudged the landing and was swept into the boiling sea before it could correct. Karin saw a dead man’s head and a dead dragon’s wingtip break the surface before being sucked under the foam. The other undead did not seem to notice.

They couldn’t stay here. The rock was so small it would be the work of moments for the zombies to sniff out their cave. Once that happened they could be cooked by dragon fire in their lair. But there was no way to get airborne without being incinerated either.

"Do you have any magic for this?" Karin whispered. Senta shook her head. Karin nodded and pulled her sword from its scabbard on Stigi’s saddle. Senta did likewise.

Karin reached up and took Stigi’s bridle. As quietly as she could, she turned the dragon around until he was facing out of the crevasse toward the zombies. Senta brought her dragon around. By jockeying and shifting the riders were able to get the dragons squeezed in side by side almost lying on each other but facing out the same way.

"Stigi," Karin whispered as the first zombies came into view, "fire." Stigi needed no encouragement. A gout of flame swept down the ravine, incinerating the first of the undead dragon riders. As Stigi reached the end of his breath, Senta’s dragon released his flame, causing Karin to avert her head and Stigi to bridle under the heat.

Twice more the dragons breathed fire turn and turn about and twice more zombies charred, burned and fell backwards into the foaming sea.

But it was a temporary victory and both of them knew it. As soon as the zombies got dragons aloft they would be incinerated in turn by dragon fire from the skies. Indeed, as Karin watched, one of the zombie dragons launched off the rock and flew low out over the ocean, wings beating to gain altitude.

A tentacle lashed out of the water and swept dragon and rider into the sea. Another tentacle swept the cliff knocking another dragon and two more zombies into the water. Then another tentacle and another and another lashed onto the shore, seizing dragon and rider alike and sweeping them beneath the foam.

"Kraken!" Karin hissed. "Keep still!"

As the living dragons and their riders pressed back into the crevasse a forest of tentacles lashed from the sea and swept over the island, tapping, probing, searching for prey. The zombies did not scream as they were picked off the rock and dragged beneath the water. Their dragons did not roar. But one by one they were all taken as food for the monster of the reef.

Still the tentacles swept on, feeling for more. Several of them explored the crack where Karin and Senta hid and one of them came so far in that it actually touched Karin.

It took all her will to keep from flinching when the tip of a slimy tentacle brushed across her boot. She squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip until she tasted blood to keep from whimpering aloud at the creature’s foul touch. In the part of her mind that could still function all she could think of was Mick. The tentacle passed on and withdrew down the crevasse. There were a few more tentative stirrings and then everything was still, save for the waves and the sea.

At last Karin dared to breathe again and she and Senta looked at each other across their dragons’ backs.

"Fortuna," Senta breathed, "Let us be gone from here before something else happens."

Karin could only nod.

In spite of the glow lamp the tunnel ahead was dark, as if something was dimming the light. Taj started forward, but Jerry held him back. "Wait a minute. I don’t like the looks of this."

"Bunny time?"

Jerry nodded and spoke the spell. First the Emac appeared and then the pink fuzzy mechanical rabbit, drum at the ready and gun slung across its back, obscuring its battery. The decoy spun mechanically and then marched down the corridor beating its drum. It had barely crossed the threshold when it disappeared in a blinding blue-green flash. Before the watchers recovered two more energy bolts smashed into the rocks over their head triggering an avalanche.

Jerry gestured frantically and the rocks seemed to bounce off an invisible shield to pile up and block the tunnel before them. Even after the rocks stopped falling the dust stayed impenetrably thick in the air, converting the humans to shadowy outlines.

The big programmer coughed and spat out a mouthful of dirt.

"Didn’t work," he said unnecessarily.

"These things learn fast," Taj said. "That’s probably built into their programs because it’s a survival characteristic. I don’t think we’d better use the same spell twice."

Jerry was still coughing and spitting, so he just nodded. "I think we’d better find another way through here," he said when he got his breath back.

"Something in the tunnel up ahead," Shamus whispered. "Magic?"

Malus paused for an instant and then shook his head. A quick gesture from their commander sent the guardsmen shuffling into a new formation, shields to the front and spears and halberds behind. Malus stepped into the second rank, squeezed between two tall pikemen, and flipped back the sleeves of his robe to leave his arms bare for action.

One instant the tunnel before them was dark and empty and the next it was filled with nightmare creatures backlit by a weird blue glow. Instinctively the humans started and pulled tighter together at the sight of the insect-like horrors bearing down upon them.

A swipe of a halberd and an ant-thing was standing headless, arms and legs waving blindly. A man in the front rank screamed and fell as a stream of acid washed over him, leaving smoking holes in his clothing and skin.

Malus and the other wizards began throwing lightning bolts, death spells and everything else they could think of. The ant-things died in droves before the magic, and more died beneath the guardsmen’s steel.

Step by step the humans were forced back by the oncoming waves of insectoid monsters. They left a trail of insect corpses behind them, but the pressure of the close-packed creatures was simply too great to withstand.

Thundering down the side tunnel came a column of dwarves, mailed, helmed and battle axes at the ready.

The dwarves hit the insect warriors about halfway down their column with an impact that shoved the bugs back against the wall. Streams of acid spattered off the dwarves. But dwarves are tough enough to handle molten metal and the steel of dwarfish armor is at least the quality of high-tech stainless. Save for an occasional lucky shot, the dwarves ignored the liquid.

They could not ignore the scything jaws and crushing pincers of their insectoid foes, but they did not succumb to them easily either. Steel and leather protected the dwarves and a dwarf which could be reached with a pincer meant an insect which could be reached by an axe. Work-hardened muscles drove axes through the insects’ chitinous exoskeletons and into the soft flesh beyond. The dwarves hewed legs, lopped pincers and chopped off heads with grim abandon, all the while forcing further into the main tunnel.

The charge split the enemy column in two and now instead of attacking, the front section was trying to defend on two fronts as the humans took renewed strength from the reinforcements. The tunnel grew slippery with blood and ichor as the distance between the humans and dwarves lessened. Finally there were only a couple of insect warriors left and the humans and dwarves were putting as much effort into avoiding each others weapons as they were into killing bugs. Meanwhile, the back part of the insect warriors’ column was being forced further and further down the tunnel. They were not retreating, but the dwarves were chopping through layer after layer of them.

Finally, at some unseen signal the remaining insects turned as one and ran down the tunnel, leaving the shorter-legged dwarves panting behind them. Thank you, Your Majesty," Malus panted.

Tosig Longbeard inclined his head in response. "We are allies." One of the dwarves pushed his way through the ranks and whispered in the king’s ear. "Now if you will excuse us, there is-ah-a matter which we must investigate." With that he turned and signaled to his followers. As they fell back and the long strode to the front Malus caught a scrap of the messenger’s words.

": piled clear to the ceiling: just everywhere."

"Well," said Malus. "If those creatures return they shall have to fight past the dwarves. Those will not give up treasure merely because of a horde of giant ants."

"Fine with me," said Shamus. "If they keep those bugs away from us they’re welcome to all the treasure they can carry."

"Light up ahead," Malkin whispered to Wiz.

What now? Giant ants or lava? He tightened his grip on his staff and motioned the others to make ready.

The light was blue, but brighter blue than the fungus in the ant tunnels. It bobbed about as it came on, casting moving shadows on the floor and walls. Wiz scanned the shadows anxiously, looking for something hiding there.

Malkin was crouched to one side, rapier drawn and ready. When he looked back at the light he could make out figures in it. In fact:

Malkin screamed and dropped her rapier. Before Wiz could react she dashed forward bare-handed.

"Jerry!" she yelled.

Wiz looked again and sure enough, it was Jerry with a knot of people. Malkin ran to Jerry and practically leapt into his arms. He hugged her and lifted her clear of the floor in a single sweeping motion. Meanwhile the others pounded up and mere was a brief orgy of back-slapping, hugging and yelling.

"How the hell did you guys get here?" Wiz asked looking over the assortment of guards, wizards and others who were with his friend.

"We came looking for you," Jerry said, through Malkin’s dark hair. Then he set her down and kissed her soundly. "Bal-Simba’s here with Moira and a bunch of other people and, oh, Wiz, this is Taj, E.T. Tajikawa."

The Tajmanian Devil? I’m honored to meet you, but how did you get here?"

"Lets just say they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse," Tajikawa said. "No, not that kind of an offer," he said when he saw Wiz’s expression. They just dangled a real interesting problem under my nose."

"You know Major Mick Gilligan?"

"Good Lord? You’re in on this, too?"

"It’s a long story," Gilligan said, "and it’s just ’Mick,’ no more major."

"Let me guess."

"We found a solution, too," Jerry said. Then he explained to Wiz and the others about A-life and the probable nature of their enemy.

"It makes sense," Wiz said when the Taj and Jerry duet finally ran down. "It would explain a lot of what we’ve found since we arrived."

"I am glad it makes sense to you," Malkin said, still clinging to Jerry’s arm,

"because it’s gibberish to me. All I know is we’ve got to find this thing and finish it."

"That’s what it comes down to," Taj agreed. "Otherwise it will get bigger, meaner and nastier all the time."

"Yeah," Danny said, "and closer too. Look!"

Wiz turned and saw zombies bearing down on them.

"Quick," Wiz yelled, "down this tunnel." Programmers, guardsmen and wizards all dashed for the indicated opening. Jerry was the last in, backing down the tunnel for a distance before turning and running to join the others.

The zombies tottered out of the cavern and started down the tunnel, their sightless eyes fixed on their prey. Wiz stepped to one side, staff raised, ready to strike out at their undead attackers. Jerry put a hand on his arm to restrain him.

"Wait a minute," he said. "I may have something better." Wiz looked apprehensively at the oncoming horde but lowered his staff.

The first zombie tottered more than usual and stopped. He jerked convulsively as if trying to lift his trailing leg, but the foot stayed planted on the floor. By this time two other zombies had stopped, then three more. Before they were twenty paces down the tunnel all the zombies were stopped, doing a weird jerky twitch-dance like a demented version of a rock video.

"That should hold them for a while," Jerry said with satisfaction.

"What in hell kind of spell was that?"

"Crazy Glue," Jerry told him.

"Yeah, but how does it work?"

"Crazy Glue."

"No, not what you call it, but how does it work?"

Jerry held up a green-and-white bottle. "Crazy Glue. Jumbo size. I picked some up when we were in Vegas. I put drops of it all over the floor. Relax. They’re not going anywhere."

"Until they cut their feet off and crawl after us," Wiz said.

Jerry looked back over his shoulder. "Don’t give them any ideas."

"You know," Wiz said as they turned the corner out into another cavern, "those are the first zombies I’ve seen in a while. I wonder what happened to all the rest of them?"

"Oh, they were delicious," came a bubbling voice out of the darkness. The group turned and the giant lobster emerged from the shadows. "Such flavor, such character." He clicked his claws together in a way that reminded Wiz of a gourmet smacking his lips. "Humans improve tremendously with aging, you know." There was a pause. "Not much conversation however, and they simply would not stop wiggling."

Wiz turned slightly green. Something in the back of his mind kept reminding him that lobsters were carrion eaters.

The lobster clicked his claw more forcefully, with a sound that rang like a rifle shot in the cavern. "Oh, parsley! I don’t suppose your friends brought any with them?"

"Not part of our MREs," Gilligan said, keeping his hand close to his pistol butt. "Sorry."

"Oh, well, one can hope, can’t one? In any event, if you’ll excuse me, I believe there are some more of them down this way." With that the lobster brushed by them and hustled off the way they had come, feelers atwitch with anticipation. Wiz, Mick and the others watched him go. Then Mick and the rest turned to look at Wiz.

"Uh, that’s the lobster."

"Another ally?" Gilligan asked.

"Kind of. Just don’t let him have you over for dinner."

TWENTY-EIGHT THE END OF THE BEGINNING

They met Bal-Simba and Malus’ group in another large chamber perhaps a half-mile on. There was another backslapping reunion and then a quick council of war to plan the final assault.

"Our detectors show the center of the thing-and Moira-are down that tunnel and in a large room beyond," Bal-Simba told the group.

"So do we sneak up on this thing?" Taj asked.

Wiz shook his head. "We’re not going to surprise it. It knows we’re coming." He looked around. "My suggestion is that we divide into two groups. One bunch of us will charge the thing and hit it hard. Hopefully that will keep it occupied. Meanwhile, the second group, with Bal-Simba and most of the wizards comes up behind, throwing as much magic at it as you can." He looked at the golden globe in the Tajmanian Devil’s hand. "Taj, you go in tucked in behind the first line, ready to lob that thing at it as soon as we get close. With luck it will be so busy with the first and second lines it won’t even see you coming."

"I claim quest companion’s right to stand in the front rank," proclaimed Glandurg, stepping forward.

Wiz sighed and nodded. "Okay. Take the extreme right of the line then. Jerry, you and Danny stay to either side of me." Malkin stepped forward. "Malkin, you stay with Jerry." June moved up next to Danny and Wiz didn’t waste breath trying to tell her where to stand.

"Now the first wave of the second rank will be mixed wizards and guardsmen. Shamus, I’ll leave it to you and Bal-Simba to order that, but I want Bal-Simba and some of the Mighty behind them. Moira, you stay in the rear with the guardsmen and Bal-Simba."

He took a deep breath. "Okay, then. We go in fast and try to hit this thing hard and all at once. Our primary objective is to get Taj close enough to this thing to throw the grenade at it." Then he paused and looked at his companions. "Our secondary objective," Wiz said grimly, "is to protect the dragon from my wife." No one mentioned the third objective.

Wiz looked at the people arrayed around him. One by one those in the first fine signaled they were ready. He looked over his shoulder and saw the second line was ready to go too.

"Wait a minute," Jerry said. "I’ve got something to go in first." He spoke a phrase, gestured and suddenly there were hundreds of fluffy pink Rambo bunnies on the floor, with machine guns slung and drums at the ready. The mechanical rabbits turned and started down the tunnel in loose order, some going straight on and some dodging from cover to cover.

Wiz’s eyebrows shot up, but he watched the "recon element" go marching, dodging and banging up the tunnel without comment.

"It knows how to deal with those," Taj pointed out.

"Yeah, but they’ll give it something else to think about."

Almost immediately the tunnel was filled with smoke, gunfire, roars, screams and colored lights. Bits of bunny, pieces of monster, boonie rags, cartridge cases, chunks of rock and other, less identifiable objects came flying out of the tunnel.

"That’s our cue, folks," Wiz yelled "Hit ’em!" With a yell the group charged down the tunnel and into bedlam.

The surviving rabbits were still blasting their way forward but not all the defenders had been suckered into attacking them. Three steps into the tunnel a giant spider dropped from the ceiling, aiming for Wiz’s face. He blasted it with a lightning bolt that sent showers of dirt and rock down on the party and kept going without breaking stride. Another step and a wall of flame came roaring down the tunnel, only to turn aside and break back under the impact of Wiz and Jerry’s spells. Meanwhile, Malkin speared something on her rapier that writhed horribly and screamed like a dying child. Wiz had only a sickening glimpse of it before Malkin tossed it back into the maelstrom before them with a flick of her blade.

Two more steps and an undead dragon reared up before them. It took the combined fire of all the wizards and several mighty strokes from Blind Fury to cripple the monster and a liquid-oxygen spell from Jerry combined with a deluge of water from Wiz to freeze the thing solid. As they scrambled over the still-straining monster, the walls of the tunnel began to constrict on them like a throat. Jerry used a spell to force the tunnel to dilate, but he could only handle a few feet at a time. They pushed on step by step with Jerry dilating and Wiz freezing the tunnel in place repeatedly.

That left Danny to handle the attacking monsters, and his methods, while generally effective, tended to be chosen for creativity. Wiz was especially impressed with the spell that created four equidistant points of strong gravitational potential around the circumference of the tunnel. It not only ripped a herd of charging tyranosaurs into little, bloody pieces, but it plastered the remains tightly against the wall so the attackers didn’t have to wade through them. His method of handling the giant acid slug left Wiz less impressed, primarily because the leftover slime was eating through his boots. The Tajmanian Devil was busy, too, although Wiz couldn’t be sure what he was up to. He thought Taj was responsible for stopping the horde of armored skeletons that fell apart into piles of bones as they came down the tunnel.

Wiz couldn’t see what was going on in the back, either. However, the yells, screams, banging and other noises told him the other waves had their hands full as well.

The air began to grow clammy and the temperature in the tunnel dropped perceptibly. Then mist began rising from the tunnel floor. Jerry and Wiz dispersed it as best they could with their staffs, but it came back ever thicker until it was a wall in front of them. Then it grew thicker yet, until it swirled around them, confining each of them in their own little bubble.

Almost touching, but isolated by fog and freezing wind, the party forged ahead into the chamber. There were bits of ice in the fog that stung against skin and eyes, distracting them and making them lower their heads. Wiz gripped his staff tighter and held his cloak before him to try to shield himself from the magical storm. Dimly he could see Danny and Taj as darker forms forcing their way ahead on either side of him, but the rest of the party was utterly lost from view and hearing. Belatedly he realized they should stop and regroup, but there was no way to communicate with the others. So he lowered his head again and concentrated on putting one foot ahead of the other on the treacherous icy floor.

The going was easier for some than others. In a few paces their neatly formed line had grown ragged and then dissolved completely.

"Wiz!" Taj yelled, and tossed the sphere to him. Wiz caught it in both hands, juggling globe and staff as the wind whipped and lashed at him.

Suddenly the wind tore the fog away and there was Moira, sitting on a throne carved of black glass. Rising behind her was a black, gelatinous mass that shimmered and rippled as if from the wind.

His wife stood and held out her arms.

"Come, darling," she breathed. "Come to me."

Wiz’s breath caught in his throat. She was as beautiful as ever. Her flaming hair a mane about her and her green eyes as wide and inviting as he remembered. Beneath the shimmering green gown he could see her belly swelling with new life. She extended her arms to him in open, aching invitation.

"Kiss me. Oh, kiss me, Wiz."

In spite of himself Wiz took a step forward, the grenade loose in his fingers. Suddenly Moira froze. She twisted and shrank in on herself. There where Moira had been was a large green frog.

Wiz gasped and stepped back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Danny blow on his fingertips, like a gunfighter blowing gunsmoke from the barrel of his six gun.

"Ribbet," said Moira.

With a convulsive jerk, Wiz hurled the golden globe over Moira’s head in the direction of the shining mass.

The sphere hit the dais beside the throne, but a hungry black pseudopod lashed out and scooped it up and into the glistening thing behind.

There were flashes within the ice, blue and green and red and orange, like the largest, most gorgeous fire opal that ever was. The cavern shook and a high, grating noise seemed to come from everywhere at once. The surface bulged and pulsed and heaved like gelatin going over speed bumps.

The mass seemed to slump in on itself and the flashes dimmed and died. Then it was an ordinary block of ice with shadowy forms embedded in it.

The wind died, the fog dissipated as rapidly as it had come and the party found themselves standing in a large room crudely hewed from the rock.

Moira was pirouetting in static little circles, her arms flung out

"Free!" she crowed, a wonderful silvery sound, "I’m free."

She stumbled back against Wiz and he caught her close. "I’m also a little unbalanced," she said, looking down at her swollen abdomen. Wiz lifted her chin and kissed her passionately, holding on as if for dear life.

Fluffy let out a plaintive wheep as if to say he wasn’t sure what had happened but he wasn’t at all happy about it

Wiz broke his hold on Moira and looked over her shoulder at Danny.

"If that change hurt the baby:"

"Relax," Danny said. "I didn’t morph her. It was just an illusion." He gestured at Glandurg and the dwarf instantly shrank into a particularly warty and unappealing brown toad. Before anyone could react, he gestured again and there was Glandurg.

"Stupid mortal tricks," the dwarf muttered.

Moira laid her hand on her husband’s sleeve. "No, I am fine. Honestly love. Never better."

"You!" came a roar from the cavern entrance. Wiz and the others turned as King Tosig stomped into the chamber with a half-dozen dwarves trailing behind. Their armor was bent, their shields were battered and their battle axes were nicked and scarred. Tosig’s blade was as damaged as those of his followers and he held it aloft in a way that boded no good. Instinctively Wiz took a tighter grip on his staff and the guardsmen moved between the wizards and the oncoming dwarves. Tosig ignored the mortals. "Come here, you," he roared, pointing at Glandurg. "I want to talk to you."

"Uncle!" exclaimed Glandurg, a little apprehensively. "I mean Your Majesty. I am here:"

"I don’t care what you’ve been up to, you young hooligan!" King Tosig bellowed

"Come here and give me that sword!"

"Of course, Uncle." Glandurg whipped Blind Fury from its scabbard and brandished it aloft, nearly eviscerating King Tosig Longbeard in the process.

"Give me that, you silly nit!" the dwarf king snarled and grabbed the sword from his relative’s hand.

"I was going to present it to you proper," Glandurg sounded hurt. "With a bow and all."

Tosig only snorted.

"Well, there it is."

E.T. Tajikawa stepped up and examined the glistening mass. "It probably wasn’t alive anyway," Taj said.

Wiz looked at the wall of ice and the shadow forms embedded in it. So this was the Enemy. He knew he should feel something. Rage, triumph, something. But looking at the glassy mass he couldn’t work up any emotion at all.

Then he turned back to Moira and all the emotions in the world overwhelmed him. Meanwhile, the dwarves had been busy looting since the end of the battle. Parties of six or seven disappeared down every tunnel and poked into each room, returning laden with boxes, bags and chests. From the rapidly growing piles it appeared that they were almost as good at looting as they were at fighting. Malkin wandered over to inspect one of the piles, needless of the dwarves’ glares. Jerry could have sworn she kept her hands clasped behind her back the whole time, but she returned to him with a suspiciously lumpy tunic. Bal-Simba turned to Tosig.

"Will you come back with us to the Wizards’ Keep? We owe you a debt and wish to thank you properly."

"Alas, we must return immediately to our own land," the dwarf long said, "We will arrange our own transportation from here."

Down the corridor dwarves were carrying boxes and bales out of one of the rooms and stacking them in the middle of the floor. Bal-Simba pointedly ignored the looting.

"Mementos of our trip," Tosig said and Bal-Simba nodded.

"Do not delay your departure over-long. It is our intent to see that this place gives us no more trouble."

"Gone we shall be right enough," Tosig said and turned away. "Hey, you," he yelled to his scavengers, "hurry up with all that. We haven’t got all day." Wiz and Moira were still locked in an embrace, oblivious to everything around them until Fluffy pushed his head between them by main force and wheeped for petting and reassurance. Absent-mindedly Wiz compiled.

"Poor dragon," Moira said without taking her eyes off Wiz’s face, "This must be so hard for him to understand."

"I’m not sure I understand it," Wiz told her. "Except that you’re back just the way you were and all’s well that ends well."

"Well," said Moira, green eyes twinkling, "to tell the truth, I do feel an urge to go chase a cat"

She laughed at his expression. "No, I am fine." Then she looked down. "Bloated, swollen, clumsy, but fine."

"You’re beautiful," Wiz said with all the conviction in the world. "You’ve never been more beautiful than you are right now."

Fluffy wheeped because Wiz had stopped petting him. This time he was ignored. This isn’t the end of it, you know," Moira said softly.

She was right. There would be others like this thing to deal with. This wasn’t the last such entity that would come to be in out-of-the-way comers of the World. For the rest of his time here he and the others would face that problem and the problem wouldn’t stop when he died.

Then Wiz Zumwalt looked down at his obviously pregnant wife and hugged her even tighter to him. "No," he said softly, "it’s only beginning."