Wizardry Compiled

Fourteen: Employee Orientation

They were crowded together on a smooth flagged floor. Looming over them on a dais at one end of the room was an enormous black man in a leopard skin loincloth and a necklace of bones. To his right was a blonde woman in a long gown.

The sun streamed in through narrow windows in the stone walls and struck shafts of gold through the dusty air.

At the points of the compass stood eight men and women in long blue robes, each holding a silver or ebony wand and each surrounded by glowing runes inscribed on the stone floor. Further back stood grim men in chain mail armed with swords and spears.

The programmers goggled.

Finally a female voice from the back of the group broke the silence. "Toto," she whispered hoarsely. "I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more."

"Merry met," the black man boomed out. "I am called Bal-Simba. I am speaker for the Council of the North and of the Mighty of this place. We are your employers."

"Did anyone bring a copy of that contract?" someone muttered.

Moira curtseyed. "Merry met, Lord. This one is called Jerry Andrews, of whom Wiz spoke often." She gestured to the rest of the group. "These others are also of the Mighty of their place. Jerry enlisted their aid."

Bal-Simba smiled, showing his teeth filed to points. "Excellent. Excellent. My Lords, Ladies, if you will come with me I will show you to your accommodations." The wizards at the compass points moved out of the way as he descended the dais and the guards stepped back. With a dozen thoroughly bewildered programmers trailing in a clump, the giant wizard left the chantry through the carved oak doors and down the stone steps into the flagged courtyard.

The morning sun made the stone walls glow warmly and cast glints of light off the windows. Banners floated from staffs at tower tops, peacock blue and brilliant green against the sky and clouds. Around them men and women stopped to stare at the newcomers and the newcomers slowed to stare back.

"Look!" one of the group pointed off to the east. A gaggle of six dark shapes stood out against the high white clouds, shapes with far too much neck and tail to be birds.

The entire group stopped dead in the courtyard. The programmers craned their necks and shielded their eyes in an effort to see better.

"Are those… ?"

"Jesus, they’re dragons"

"How the hell would you know? You’ve never seen a dragon."

"I have now."

The dragons came closer, dropping lower and making it easier to pick out the details. Their guides made as if to move on but the programmers stood rooted in place.

"Hey, there are people on them!"

The Californians watched awestruck as the dragons glided around the tallest tower in tight V formation, wingtips almost touching as their riders pulled them into the turn. Then as one, the beasts winged over and fell away toward their aerie in the cliff beneath the castle.

And then they were gone. The newcomers let out a sigh with a single breath and everyone started across the courtyard again.

The programmer standing next to Bal-Simba, a heavy-set dark-haired woman wearing a faded unicorn T-shirt, touched his arm.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what, My Lady?"

She nodded toward where the flight of dragons had disappeared, her eyes shining. "For that. For letting me see that."

Bal-Simba looked at her closely. To him dragons were simply part of the World, sometimes useful, often dangerous, but nothing extraordinary. He had never stopped to think about what dragons on the wing meant. Now, confronted with her wonder, he saw them in a new light.

"Thank you, My Lady," he said gravely.

Not everyone was impressed with the dragons’ performance. One who wasn’t at all impressed was the leader of the flight.

"Where were you on that last turn?" he demanded of his wingman as they crossed the cavern that served as roost and aerie for the dragon cavalry.

"There’s a turbulence on the west side of the tower at this time of day," his wingman explained. "I figured it would be safer to open it up a little."

"Turbulence, nothing! That was sloppy. What did you think you were doing hanging out there?"

Behind them the riders and grooms were leading the dragons to their stalls, the rider at the head, holding the bridle and talking gently to his mount and a groom at each wingtip and two at the tail to see that the dragons did not accidently bump and perhaps begin to fight.

Other teams of grooms hurried about, removing saddles and unfastening harnesses. The armorers removed the quivers of magic arrows from the harness and counted each arrow, carefully checking the numbers against the tally sticks before returning them to the armory.

In spite of the lanterns along the walls the aerie was gloomy after the bright morning. The entrance was a rectangle of squintingly bright white. It was noisy as well. The rock walls magnified sound and the shuffle of beasts, the shouts of the men and the occasional snort or hiss of a dragon reverberated through the chamber.

Both dragon riders ignored the noise and the bustle, intent on their conversation. The other members of the troop avoided them until the chewing out was done.

"Playing it safe, sir."

"Safe my ass! Mister, in combat that kind of safety will get you killed."

The wingman bridled. "Sir, there is no one left to fight."

The Dragon Leader grinned nastily. "Want to bet? Do you think the Council keeps us around because we look pretty?"

The wingman didn’t answer.

"Well," the Dragon Leader demanded. "Why do you think we exist?"

"To fight, sir."

"Too right we exist to fight. And how much good do you think you’re going to be in a melee if you’ve trained your mount to open wide on the turns? Mister, in my squadron if you are going to do something, you are going to do it right. We exist to fight, and war or no war, you will by damn be ready to fight. Is that clear?"

"Yes sir," the wingman said woodenly, eyes straight ahead.

"Every maneuver, every patrol, you will treat like the real thing. Remember those checklists they drilled into you in school? Well mister, you will live by those checklists. As long as you’re in my squadron you will do everything by the checklist. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then see to it. And if you float out like that on a turn again you’ll spend the next two weeks on stable duty! Now see to your mount."

The Dragon Leader watched the man go and frowned. With the Dark League crushed there were no enemy dragons to face. It was hard to keep an edge on his men. The kid was good, one of the best of the crop of new riders that had come along since the defeat of the Dark League, but he didn’t have the same attitude as the men and women who had fought through the long, bitter years of the League’s ascendancy.

He could have made it easy on himself and insisted on an experienced second. But somebody had to work these young ones up and if it wasn’t done right they wouldn’t be worth having if they had to fight.

Meanwhile his muscles were stiff, his flying leathers soaked with sweat and he stank of dragon and exertion. He turned and walked out of the aerie toward the riders’ baths.

At the door the Dragon Leader looked back and sighed. In some ways it was easier when we were at war.

"… and there you have it, My Lords," Bal-Simba said finally. "That is our situation and that is what we need."

Jerry, Karl, Bal-Simba and Moira sat around the table. They had talked the day away and a good part of the night. Moira was hoarse, so Bal-Simba had taken over filling in the background while Jerry and Karl shot questions.

The remains of dinner, bread, fruit and cheese, sat on the sideboard and a glowing globe on a wrought iron stand beside the table gave them light.

The soft evening breeze ruffled through the room and stars spangled the velvety blackness outside. Idly Jerry wondered what time it was. Their watches had stopped working at the moment of transition. After midnight, he decided.

The rest of the programmers were bedded down somewhere but Bal-Simba was eager to get started and Jerry was too keyed up to sleep anyway.

"Well, it’s hard to say until we’ve gone over the work that’s already been done," Jerry said. If the libraries and tool kit are sufficiently developed…"

"I think it would be best if we left the technical details until Wiz returns," Moira said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Bal-Simba shift uneasily. "He is the only one among us who really understands them."

"Anyway, the outlines are clear enough," Jerry said. "As I told Moira back in Cupertino I think this is do-able, especially given the work Wiz has already put into it."

"How soon do you need all this?" Karl asked.

"As soon as possible," Bal-Simba told him. "Perhaps a fortnight at most."

Jerry and Karl looked at each other.

"Well," Karl said, "no matter where you go, some things don’t change."

Bal-Simba frowned. "Is there a problem?"

Jerry sighed. This was the point where you usually started lying to the client. But this was a very unusual situation and an even more unusual client. Besides, there was no one on this world to undercut them and steal the contract by overpromising.

"Look," he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table, "the truth is, it will take us months to do this job right."

"But Wiz put together his attack on the Dark League in a matter of days!" Bal-Simba protested.

"Right," Jerry nodded. "What Wiz did was create a set of tools and build some simple programs, uh, spells with them. But there’s a big difference between something that an expert hacks together for his own use and a production system."

"You need something anyone can use, right?" Karl asked.

"Any wizard," Bal-Simba amended. "But yes, basically."

"Okay, that means you need a lot more support, error checking and utilities and libraries. And it’s all got to be wrapped up in a neat package with no loose ends."

The huge wizard thought about that for a minute. "How long will all this take?"

"We won’t know that until after we’ve examined what’s been done already and had a chance to talk to Wiz."

"You can begin the examination tomorrow," Bal-Simba said, rising. "There is no need to wait until Sparrow returns." He turned to Moira. "My Lady, will you escort them to their chambers?"

"If you please, My Lord, there is another matter I wish to discuss with you. I will ring for a servant."

The serving man was yawning when he arrived, but he came quickly and ushered the visitors out of Bal-Simba’s study.

"Now," Moira said as the door closed behind them, "where is Wiz?"

"Well, as to that, My Lady…"

Her face darkened. "Something has happened to him, has it not?"

"Well…"

"Has it not?" She tried to shout but her strained vocal cords could only produce a whisper.

"We do not know," Bal-Simba told her. "He went off into the Wild Wood and no one has seen him since."

"Fortuna!" Moira stared. "You let him wander into the Wild Wood alone?" The she laughed bitterly. "And you were concerned about my safety?"

Wiz tiptoed down the corridor, stopping every few feet to listen. Outside the bright daylight promised warmth the sun failed to deliver.

He was desperately hungry, but he was past feeling the pangs. In the last two days he had turned up nothing that looked edible. He wasn’t the only scavenger going through the rubble. Rat droppings abounded, as did signs of larger, less identifiable creatures.

He stopped to listen again, pressing himself flat against the wall as he did so. He had learned caution the hard way. Twice more since he left the palace with the trap he had barely avoided blundering into searching wizards of the League. Once he ducked into an open doorway just as two of them came around a corner not ten feet in front of him. Another time one of them caught a glimpse of him from one street over. The wizard made the mistake of calling for help and Wiz scampered away before he could get close.

He was surprised that no one had used magic to locate him. Even with the competing magical remnants in the City of Night it should have been easy for wizards who had stood in his presence to track him down, especially since he dared not leave the city. The land beyond the walls was as frozen and barren as Antarctica. Away from the shelter of these buildings he’d be dead in a day and he was sure the wizards knew it.

Perhaps Dzhir Kar was playing with him, stretching out the agony. Through his exhaustion, Wiz realized he could not win. Sooner or later, he had to use magic or fall to the searching wizards or the danger of this place.

Well, not yet. He was still alive and still free. At this minute finding food and warmth were more important to him than his ultimate fate. Moving as quietly as he could he moved down the corridor to the next door.

This place must have been pleasant once, or as pleasant as any in this benighted city ever had been. The building itself was mostly underground, a gloomy mass of tunnels and small rooms dimly lit by slowly fading magic globes. But this wing was built into the face of a cliff. The rooms on the outside had long narrow windows that looked out over the city. Judging by the shattered, soaked junk that remained they had been richly furnished as well.

But shattered, soaked junk was all that remained. What had once been rich fabric lay in sodden rotting piles. Scattered about were pieces of furniture, all hacked, broken and upended.

He looked at the wood regretfully. There were the makings there for a warming fire—if he could figure out how to light one without bringing the demon down on him and if he didn’t mind attracting every wizard in the city.

Aside from that, there was no sign of anything useful. No food, no clothing, nothing. He turned to leave when something caught his eye. He bent and plucked it from the litter.

It was a halberd, its head red with rust and its shaft broken to about three feet long. Looking at the end of the shaft, Wiz could see it had been cut halfway through before it snapped, as if the owner had warded a stroke.

Wiz hefted it dubiously. He knew nothing about halberd fighting and this one was broken, useless for its original purpose. But it could still serve as a tool to pry open chests and boxes. Perhaps with it he would have a better chance of finding food.

Clutching his prize, Wiz crept back out into the corridor.

"Wiz kept notes on how his spell compiler worked," Moira explained to the gaggle of programmers who followed her into her apartment the next morning. "He did most of that here rather than in his workroom. I think it would be best if you removed them yourselves, lest I miss something."

"Thanks," Jerry said as he went over to the desk, "we’ll get some boxes and…"

Then he saw the dragon sitting on top of the leather-bound book. A small, but very alert and obviously upset dragon. The dragon hissed and Jerry realized he, Karl and Moira were suddenly two paces ahead of everyone else in the group.

"What’s that?"

"That is the demon guardian Wiz created to protect his spells, especially the book holding most of his secrets. He called it the Dragon Book," Moira explained.

Karl looked at Moira, Jerry looked at Karl and the dragon eyed them both.

"That had to be deliberate," Karl said finally.

Jerry made a face as if he had bitten into something sour. "Believe me, it was."

"Crave pardon?"

"There’s a standard text on writing compilers called the dragon book." Jerry explained. "It’s got a picture of a dragon on the cover. A red dragon."

"It was orange on my edition."

"As protection of the contents?" Moira asked.

"More like a warning of what the course is like. It’s a real bear."

"Then why not put a bear on the cover?"

"Bears aren’t red," Karl put in before Jerry could answer. "They’re not orange either."

Moira frowned. "Oh," she said in a small voice.

"Anyway, how do we get rid of him?"

"Easily enough. Wiz taught me the dismissal spell." She stepped to the edge of the desk and spoke to the demon.

"puff at ease exe."

The dragon crawled off the book and retired to the corner of the desk.

"That is a spell in Wiz’s magic language," she explained, turning back to the programmers. "The word exe is the command to start the spell, at ease is the spell and puff is the name of this demon."

"Well, it is a magic dragon," Karl said. A couple of the programmers groaned and Jerry winced again.

"Okay," Jerry said. "We’ll get this stuff out of your way and moved to our office as soon as possible. Uh, do you know where we are going to be?"

"The under-seneschal is waiting to show you to your workrooms," Moira said. "He is in the courtyard, I believe."

"Great. Let’s go then." Everyone moved back toward the door, except Danny Gavin who was lounging in a chair.

"Are you coming?" Jerry asked.

"No, I think I’ll stay here," Danny said. "Unless you need me?"

Jerry looked at Moira and Moira shrugged.

"Just don’t wander off."

Almost as soon as the door was closed Danny was out of his chair and over to the Dragon Book. The guardian demon raised its head when he opened it but made no protest.

Now let’s see what this magic stuff is like. Danny scanned the first few pages quickly, picking up the basics of the syntax as he went. Then he flipped further back and looked at a few of the commands.

Shit, this is a piece of cake. He went back and re-read the first part of the book more carefully, already mentally framing his first spell.

"We had to prepare workspace for you on short notice," the under-seneschal said apologetically as he led the group across another courtyard. "I’m afraid all the towers are taken and Lord Bal-Simba doubted you would prefer caves. So to give you a place where you can all work together, we ah, well, we cleaned out an existing building."

He was a small, fussy man who seemed to bob as he walked and kept rubbing his hands together nervously. He had been given an impossible job on very short notice and he was very much afraid his solution would insult some very important people. As they moved across the courtyard he became more and more nervous.

"We weren’t expecting so many of you, you see and we are so terribly crowded here…" His voice trailed off as they approached the building.

It was sturdily built of stone below and timber above. As they drew nearer, a distinctive aroma gave a hint of its original purpose and once they stepped through the large double doors there was no doubt at all as to what it was.

"A stable?" Jerry said dubiously.

"Well, ah, a cow barn actually," the man almost cringed as he said it.

"Wonderful," Cindy said, "back in the bullpen."

"Oh wow, man," said one of the group, a graying man with his hair pulled back into a pony tail, "like rustic."

"Hell, I’ve worked in worse," one of the programmers said as he looked around. "I used to be at Boeing."

The room was good-sized, but as cold as every other place in the City of Night. A mullioned window, its tracery in ruins, let in the sharp outside air. Piles of sodden trash and pieces of broken furniture lay here and there. On one wall stood a tall black cabinet, tilting on a broken leg but its doors still shut.

Wiz came into the room eagerly. Maybe there was something in the closed cabinet he could use.

Cold and hunger dulled his caution and he was halfway across the room before a skittering sound behind him told him he had made a mistake.

Wiz whirled at the sound, but it was too late. There, blocking the only way out, was a giant black rat. It was perhaps five feet long in the body and its shoulder reached to Wiz’s waist. Its beady eyes glared at Wiz. It lifted its muzzle to sniff the human, showing long yellow teeth. Wiz stepped back again and the rat sniffed once more, whiskers quivering.

Wiz licked his lips and took a firmer grip on the broken halberd shaft. The rat eyed him hungrily and moved all the way into the room, its naked tail still trailing out into the corridor.

Wiz stepped to one side, hoping the rat would follow and leave him room for a dash to the door. But the rat wasn’t fooled. It lowered its head and squealed like a piglet caught in a fence. Then it charged.

In spite of his disinclination to exercise, Wiz had naturally fast reflexes. Moreover, his two years in the World had hardened his muscles and increased his wind. He was far from being the self-described "pencil-necked geek" he had been when he had arrived here, but he was even further from being a warrior.

The monster closed in squealing. Wiz swung wildly with his rusty axe. The giant rat ducked under the blade and leaped for his throat.

Against a halfway competent swordsman the tactic would have worked. But Wiz wasn’t even halfway competent. He had swung blindly and he brought his weapon back equally blindly, backhand along the same path.

The spike on the back of the axe caught the rat just below the ear. Any guardsman on the drill field would have winced at such a puny blow, but the spike concentrated the force on a single spot. Wiz felt a "crunch" as the spike penetrated bone. The rat squealed, jerked convulsively and fell in a twitching heap at Wiz’s feet.

Wiz’s first instinct was to turn and run. But he checked himself. Think he told himself sternly, you’ve got to think. Running wouldn’t solve anything. There was nowhere to run to and running burned calories he could ill-afford to lose. Panic wouldn’t get him the food he so desperately needed.

Well, he thought, looking down at the gray-furred corpse, maybe I can use one problem to solve another.

Kneeling over the body, he set to work with his halberd.

Wiz emerged from the room a while later wiping his mouth on a bit of more or less clean rag.

Rat sashimi, Wiz decided, wasn’t half bad—if you used lots of wasabe. He didn’t have any wasabe, but it still wasn’t half bad.

While the rest of the team broke for lunch, Jerry, Karl and Moira went back to the apartment to start sorting through Wiz’s papers.

"A barn!" Moira said angrily. "I cannot believe they would do that to you."

"Hey, it’s dry and it looks like it can be made fairly comfortable," Karl said. "Besides, it’s already divided up into cubicles."

"Well, I can assure you, My Lords…" Moira began as she started to open the door.

There was a low moan and the sound of scuffling from the apartment.

Moira threw open the door.

"Danny!" Jerry yelled.

The young programmer was rocking back and forth, his body slamming first forward almost to the desk and then back so forcefully the chair teetered.

"Something’s wrong! He’s having a stroke or something."

"Stay away from him!" Moira ordered. "He is caught in a spell."

"Stop it."

"I do not know how. The command should be in the book.

Jerry edged around the still-thrashing Danny and hooked the Dragon Book off the desk. The dragon demon ignored him, watching Danny the way a cat watches a new and particularly interesting toy.

"Damn, no index!"

"Try the table of contents," Karl suggested.

"No table of contents, either!" He paged frantically through the book and muttered something about hackers under his breath.

"Here it is." He read hurriedly. "reset!" he commanded.

Danny continued to jerk back and forward.

"Exe, My Lord," Moira said frantically. "You must end with exe."

"Oh, right. reset exe!"

Suddenly Danny flopped forward and hit the table with a thump.

Moira and Jerry gently raised him up and leaned him back in the chair.

"Are you okay?" Jerry asked as the teenaged programmer gasped for breath.

" ’s alright," he slurred as he lifted his head off his chest. "I’ll be alright." Jerry saw he was white and shaking but he was breathing more normally.

"What happened?" Danny mumbled.

Moira pressed a cup of wine into his hands.

"You were entrapped by the spell you created, My Lord," she told him. "The spell repeated endlessly and you could not get out."

"In other words you were stuck in a DO loop," Jerry explained.

Danny raised the cup in both hands and drained it in a gulp.

"Jesus. I was in there and it started and it just kept going over and over. Like a live wire you can’t let go." He lowered the cup and it slipped from his numbed grasp to clatter on the table. "Jesus!"

"Tell us what happened."

"Well, I was flipping through the manual and I figured I’d try it out. So I set up a simple little hack, only when it started it just kept going. I didn’t think I’d ever get out."

"That was a dumb-ass stunt," Jerry told him. "You’re lucky it wasn’t worse."

"How the hell was I supposed to know?" Danny snapped. "I didn’t think…"

"You sure as hell didn’t," Jerry cut him off. "And you’d better start thinking before you do a damn fool thing like that again!"

Danny muttered something but Jerry ignored him.

"Okay," Jerry said. "From now on nobody practices this stuff alone."

Wiz was feeling almost jaunty as he made his way up the street with the broken halberd over his shoulder. He was still cold, but on a day as bright as this he could almost ignore that. Besides, the cold was easier to bear when you weren’t hungry all the time.

The halberd made a big difference in Wiz’s standard of living. There turned out to be a lot more food left in the City of Night than he had realized. But almost all of what remained was locked behind doors or in cupboards or chests. In the last few days he had gotten very good at using the halberd’s axe blade and the heavy spike behind to pry, chop and smash things open. Finding food was a full-time job, but it wasn’t quite the hopeless one it had been.

Today he was well-fed on magically preserved meat and bread so dry and brick-like he had to soak it in water before he could eat it. The meat had an odd taste and the water he soaked the bread in hadn’t been very clean, but his stomach was still pleasantly full.

And now this neighborhood looked promising. The street was lined with smaller buildings, two and three stories. A number of small buildings, shops or houses, were more likely to yield food than a few big ones. Best of all, the doors and window shutters on nearly every house on the street were intact. That meant they had not been systematically looted and larger scavengers had been kept out.

The weather added to his mood. There was not a trace of the clouds that usually hung low and gray over the Southern Lands. The only thing in the pale-blue sky was the sun and it was almost at its zenith. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in it, but there was a certain amount of cheer.

A motion above the buildings caught his eye. Wiz turned his head just in time to see a black-robed wizard drift lazily over the rooftops. The man’s robe fluttered about his ankles and his head moved constantly as he scanned the city.

Wiz shrank back against the wall. But he knew he stood out sharply against the dark volcanic rock of the street and buildings. There wasn’t even a shadow to hide in and the wizard was floating in his direction. He was as exposed as an ant on a griddle and he would be fried like one as soon as the wizard spotted him.

Wiz bit his lip and silently cursed the bright sun and the shuttered houses. He looked up and down the street frantically, but there was not an open door or window to be seen.

There was a storm sewer opposite. It didn’t look big enough to take him and it was covered with an iron grate, but it was the only chance he had. Wiz dashed across the street and levered up the grate with a quick jerk of his halberd. Then heedless of how deep the hole might be he thrust himself through.

It was perhaps eight feet from the street to the trickle of freezing slime that ran through the bottom of the sewer. The shock and the slippery bottom forced him to his hands and knees before he regained his balance. He looked up just in time to see the wizard float down the street housetop high.

Wiz dared not breathe as the man passed over the grating. The sorcerer looked directly down at his hiding place, but floated on by majestically. Apparently the shadows in the hole hid Wiz from him.

Once the man passed out of Wiz’s field of vision, he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he froze again. There was something moving in the tunnel behind him. Something big.

The tunnel was as black as the inside of midnight, but Wiz heard a splash-scrape sound as if something too large to move quietly was trying to do so. He listened more intently. Again the splash-scrape, nearer this time.

Wiz realized he was trapped. He couldn’t see the flying wizard, but he could not have gone far. Leaving the shelter of the sewer meant exposing himself to his enemies. On the other hand, whatever he was sharing this tunnel with was getting closer by the second.

For some reason it stuck in his mind that he had found no bodies in the ruins. Not even bones.

He listened again. There was no further sound from the tunnel except the drip, drip of water. The lack of sound reminded him of a cat getting ready to pounce.

With one motion he twisted around and lashed upward with the halberd. The spike caught on the edge of the hole and he swung himself up to grab the coping with his other hand.

Behind him came a furious splashing. He swung his leg up and rolled free of the sewer just as a huge pair of jaws snapped shut where he had been. Wiz had a confused impression of a mouth full of ripping teeth and a single evil eye before he rolled away from the opening.

Gasping, Wiz gained his feet and flattened against the building. There was no sign of the flying wizard and the creature in the sewer showed no sign of coming after him.

Muddy, chilled and thoroughly frightened, Wiz ran off down the street, looking for a place to hide.

"Well," said Jerry Andrews, "what have we got?"

The team was crowded into the Wizard’s Day Room, which they were using as a temporary office while the last renovations were completed on the cow barn.

For the last two days the programmers had torn into Wiz’s spell compiler and the material he had left behind. By ones and twos they had pored over the Dragon Book, Wiz’s notes and conducted small and carefully controlled experiments.

Now Jerry had called a meeting to sum up, compare notes and plan strategy. He had set it for late afternoon, so most of the programmers were awake and functional. They had pushed the tables in the Day Room together to make a long table in the middle of the room and, heedless of tradition, pulled chairs from their accustomed spots up around it.

"Does the phrase ’bloody mess’ do anything for you?" a lean woman with short black hair and piercing dark eyes asked from halfway down the table. "This thing is written in something that looks like a bastard version of Forth crossed with LISP and some features from C and Modula 2 thrown in for grins."

"When do we get to meet this guy, anyway?" someone else asked. "I’d like to shake him warmly by the throat."

"There may be a problem with that, My Lord," Moira said from her place next to Jerry. "He went off alone into the Wild Wood and we have not yet found him."

"We’re going to need him," Nancy said. "Someone has got to explain this mess. Some of this code is literally crawling with bugs."

"You mean figuratively," Jerry corrected.

"I said literally and I mean literally," she retorted. "I tried to run one routine and I got a swarm of electric blue cockroaches." She made a face. "Four-inch-long electric blue cockroaches."

"Actually the basic concept of the system is rather elegant and seems to be surprisingly powerful," Karl said.

Nancy snorted.

"No, really. The basic structure is solid. There are a lot of kludges and some real squinky hacks, but at bottom this thing is very good."

"I’ll give you another piece of good news," Jerry told them. "Besides the Dragon Book, Wiz left notes with a lot of systems analysis and design. Apparently he had a pretty good handle on what he needed to do, he just didn’t have the time to do it. I think we can use most of what he left us with only a minimal review."

"Okay, so far we’ve just been nibbling around the edges to get the taste of the thing. Now we’ve got to get down to serious work."

"There’s one issue we’ve got to settle first," Nancy said. "Catching errors."

"What’s the matter, don’t you like electric blue cockroaches?" Danny asked.

"Cockroaches I can live with. They glow in the dark and that makes them easy to squash. I’m more concerned about HMC or EOI-type errors."

"HMC and EOI?"

"Halt, Melt and Catch fire or Execute Operator Immediately."

"One thing this system has is a heck of an error trapping system," said Jerry.

"That is because the consequences of a mistake in a spell can be terrible," Moira told him. "Remember, a spell is not a computer which will simply crash if you make an error."

The people up and down the table looked serious, even Danny.

"Desk check your programs, people," Jerry said.

"That’s not going to be good enough. There are always bugs, and bugs in this stuff can bite—hard. We need a better system for catching major errors."

"There is one way," Judith said thoughtfully.

"How?"

"Redundancy with voting. We use three different processors—demons—and they have to all agree. If they don’t the spell is aborted."

"Fine, so suppose there’s a bug in your algorithm?"

"You use three different algorithms. Then you code each primitive three different ways. Say one demon acts like a RISC processor, another is a CISC processor and the third is something like a stack machine. We split up into three teams and each team designs its own demon without talking to any of the others."

"That just tripled the work," someone said.

"Yeah, but it gives us some margin for error."

"I think we’ve got to go for the maximum safety," Jerry Andrews said finally. "I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have no desire to see what a crash looks like from inside the system."

"My Lord, you seem to have made remarkable progress," Moira said as Jerry showed her through the programmers’ new quarters.

The team had settled in quickly. Each programmer got his or her own stall and trestle tables filled the center aisle. The stalls were full of men and women hunched over their trestle table desks or leafing through stacks of material. At the far end of the room Judith and another programmer were sketching a diagram in charcoal on the whitewashed barn wall.

"Once you get used to giving verbal commands to an Emac instead of using a keyboard and reading the result in glowing letters in the air, programming spells isn’t all that different from programming computers," Jerry told her. "We’d be a lot further along if Wiz were available, but we’re not doing badly."

Moira’s brow wrinkled. "I wish he was here too. But we cannot even get a message to him, try as we might." She shook the mood off. "It must be very hard to work with spells without having the magician who made them to guide you."

"It’s not as bad as it might be," Jerry told her. "Probably our biggest advantage is that we know all the code was written by one person and I’m very familiar with Wiz’s programming style.

"Look, a lot of this business is like playing a guessing game with someone. The more you know about the person and the way that person thinks, the more successful you are likely to be."

He sighed. "Still, it would be nice not to have to guess at all. Besides, Wiz is good. He’d be a real asset."

"We are doing everything we can to locate him," Moira said. "Meanwhile, is there anything else you need?"

"A couple of things. First, is there any way to get cold cuts and sandwich fixings brought in? My people tend to miss meals."

"Certainly. Anything else?"

"Well, you don’t have coffee, tea or cola here, so I guess not."

"Wiz used to drink blackmoss tea," Moira told him, "but that is terrible stuff."

"Can we try some?" Jerry asked.

Moira rang for a servant and while they waited for the tea, she and Jerry chatted about the work.

"We call the new operating system ’WIZ-DOS’—that’s the Wiz Zumwalt Demon Operating System."

"If this thing has a 640K memory limit, I quit!" someone put in from one of the stalls.

"As far as we know there’s no limit at all on memory," Jerry said. It’s just that addressing it is kind of convoluted."

Moira didn’t understand the last part, but her experience with Wiz had taught her the best thing to do was to ignore the parts she didn’t understand. To do otherwise invited an even more incomprehensible "explanation."

"I’m sure Wiz would be honored to have this named after him," she said.

The tea arrived already brewed. Moira, who had used it when she was standing vigil as part of her training, thought it smelled nasty. Jerry didn’t seem to notice. Moira poured out a small amount of the swamp-water-brown brew. Dubiously, she extended the cup. Jerry sniffed it, then sipped. Then he drained the cup and smacked his lips. "Not bad," he said appraisingly. "A little weak, but not bad. Can we arrange to have a big pot of this stuff in the Bull Pen while we’re working?"

"Of course, My Lord, I’ll have the kitchen send up a pot."

"I mean a big pot," Jerry said. "Say thirty or sixty cups."

Moira, remembering the effect that even a cup of blackmoss tea had on her, stared at him.

"Well, there are more than a dozen of us," he said apologetically.

Moira nodded, wondering if there was enough blackmoss in the castle to supply this crew for even a week.

Fifteen: War Warning

Bal-Simba was walking in the castle garden when his deputy found him.

"Lord," Arianne said strangely. "Someone wishes to speak to you."

"Who?" the black wizard asked, catching her mood.

"Aelric, the elf duke."

Duke Aelric, or rather his image, was waiting for him in the

Watcher’s room. The Watchers, who kept magical watch on the entire world, shifted uneasily at their communications crystals in the elf’s presence.

Bal-Simba studied the apparition as he mounted the dais overlooking the sunken floor where the Watchers worked. The elf duke was wearing a simple tunic of dark-brown velvet that set off his milk-white complexion. His long hair was caught back in a golden filet set with small yellow gems at his temples. His face was serene and untroubled, not that that meant anything. Elves were inhumanly good at hiding their feelings and in any event their emotions were not those of mortals.

Bal-Simba had heard Wiz and Moira’s story of their rescue by Duke Aelric and their dinner with him, but this was the first time Bal-Simba had ever seen him. Come to that, it is the first time I have ever seen any elf this close, he thought as he seated himself in his chair.

Duke Aelric seemed not to notice Bal-Simba until he was properly settled to receive his guest.

"I seek the Sparrow, but I am told he is not available," Aelric said.

"He is not here."

"Do you know when he will return?"

Bal-Simba considered the question before answering.

"I do not. He is off in the Wild Wood, I believe."

Aelric raised a silver eyebrow. "Indeed? Forgive me if I pry, but when did he leave?"

"Forgive my curiosity, but why do you wish to know?"

"Because he was on business of some urgency when he left my hold to return to your city a fortnight hence," Aelric said.

Bal-Simba frowned mightily. "He was coming straight back?"

Aelric waved a hand. "That was his plan. He left upon the Wizard’s Way to return here immediately." He looked sharply at the black Wizard.

"I swear to you he did not arrive here," Bal-Simba told him. He struck his chest. "Upon my life I swear it."

"I believe you, oath or no," the image said.

"I will also tell you that we have been trying to contact him for several days without success. Frankly, we are becoming worried."

Elf and mortal fell silent, contemplating the implications.

"It occurs to me," the elf duke said slowly, "that someone may have transgressed upon my hospitality. I do not appreciate interference with those traveling to and from my abode."

"It occurs to me that Wiz may be in dire danger," Bal-Simba said, a trifle sharply.

"I hope not," Aelric told him. "For all our sakes."

It was Bal-Simba’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

"A matter of forestalling a war between humans and other users of magic, I think," Duke Aelric explained.

"War?"

"Did you expect your drive to exterminate magical creatures along the Fringe would go unremarked? Or that your expansion deep into the Wild Wood would pass unnoticed?"

"I think that there is a great deal going on out on the Fringe that I and the Council are unaware of."

Aelric waved a languid hand. "That is as it may be. The Sparrow seemed to feel he could turn this human tide before it came to that." Then he sobered and power seemed to radiate out of him like a nimbus.

"But I tell you this, wizard. If you cannot find your Sparrow—and soon—then you may have lost your only chance to forestall a war which would rend the World asunder."

He nodded gravely. "Merry part."

Bal-Simba’s eyes widened at the usage, but he nodded in reply. "Merry meet again." And the elf duke’s image was gone.

Bal-Simba heaved a great sigh. "When an elf uses human courtesies you know you are in trouble," he remarked to no one in particular. Then the giant black wizard turned to the gaping Watchers in the pit.

"I want every Watcher we have scanning the World for our Sparrow." He turned to Arianne. "Set up a schedule so we may search day and night." Then to one of the wizards with a communication crystal. "Send the word out to all the villages and habitations at once. Wiz must be found. And order the dragon cavalry out to search as well."

"Lord, do you think he meant what he said about war?" Arianne asked.

"Have you ever known an elf to joke?" Bal-Simba said. "He was concerned enough to come to us. That is more than sufficient proof that something very dangerous is in the air."

"Jerry, I think you’d better look at this."

Judith was standing at the entrance to Jerry’s stall with an odd look on her face.

"We got the voting module working and, well, I think you’d better see the result."

Jerry followed her over to her own stall where Karl was looking bemused at three small demons standing together on the table.

"We know that any spell above a certain level of complexity generates a demon as its physical manifestation," Judith explained. "So we expected this thing would produce demons. But watch what happens when we feed it correct code.

"emac." An Emac popped up on the desk next to the trio of demons.

"backslash test1 exe." Judith said and the Emac gabbled at the demons. The demons stood motionless and then the one on the left hummed.

"Okayyy," it sang in a vibrant bass.

"Okayyy," the middle one chimed in a rich baritone.

"Okayyyy," said the third demon in a fine clear tenor.

"Okaayyyyyy," the three demon voices blended in perfect harmony. Then the sound died away and they fell silent.

For a moment none of the programmers said anything.

"The question is, is that a bug or a feature?" Karl asked.

"I guess that depends on how you feel about music," Jerry said. "Anyway, we don’t have time to fix it, so we’ll call it a feature."

Judith looked at the demons and shook her head. "I’m glad we didn’t build four processors. I’m not sure I could take a barbershop quartet."

"I don’t thing you’d get a barbershop quartet," Jerry said judiciously. "A gospel group seems more likely."

"Worse."

By nature and training Danny needed a lot of time to himself. It had always been his refuge in times of trouble and his joy in times of special happiness.

The castle was too crowded for him to be really alone. But he had found a place on the rooftops where he could look down on the Bull Pen and the courtyards. From here he was hidden from view by any of the wizard’s towers and could see out beyond the Wizards’ Lodge, over the tile and slate rooftops of the town and off into the rolling blue distance.

Nearly every morning before he settled down to work, Danny would climb the narrow stairs to the attic and then go up the wooden ladder and out through the trap door that took him to his favorite place on the roof. He was not experienced enough in the ways of this World to know that the scuff-marks on the slates meant someone else came here too.

Today Danny had changed his pattern. It was late afternoon, normally a time when he would be settled in the Bull Pen and hard at work. But today his code had turned to shit and Cindy Naismith got on his case for something he said. So he left and came back up here for a while.

He wouldn’t be missed, he knew. Not for some little time. Programmers set their own hours and besides, the rest of the team didn’t like him very much.

Well, fuck ’em. That wasn’t anything new to Danny.

Besides, he told himself, it wasn’t like he was goofing off. He was still thinking about the problem, and he needed to clear his head, didn’t he?

There was a soft scrabbling noise on the slate roof behind him.

Danny turned and there was a thin brown-haired girl with enormous doe eyes.

"Hi," Danny said, half-resenting the interruption.

The girl moved back up the roof, away from him.

"Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you." The girl froze.

"You okay?"

No response. If he moved toward her she would have fled, but he kept his place. She sat down on the roof behind and above him and looked out over the city.

Well, if she didn’t want to talk… Danny turned back to watch the clouds himself. It wasn’t as good as being completely alone, but it wasn’t bad either.

Danny had taken to computers as a way to shut out the endless arguments that raged through his home. Later, after the divorce, the computer had become a way out of the loneliness, a friend who never turned its back on you or put you down.

At first he hadn’t cared for programming, just racking up scores on video games. He had taken out his frustrations destroying aliens and monsters by the thousands and scoring points by the millions. Then he found out you could gimmick some of the games by editing character files. From that it was one small step to cracking copy protection to get games he couldn’t afford to buy and one thing led to another. By the time he was sixteen, Danny was a very competent, if unsystematic, programmer.

He was also very, very lonely.

Now here he was in a world something like the one those games were based on. Full of monsters and where magic worked. And he was still just as alone and just as cut off as he ever had been. Well, fuck ’em. He’d get by, just like he always had.

Without thinking, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sandwich he had stashed there—smoked meat and sharp cheese on a long roll.

Danny heard the girl shift on the roof behind him.

"Want some?" She obviously did, but she was afraid to approach him.

"Here." He broke off half the sandwich and held it out to her. She looked at him intently but didn’t move. He considered tossing the sandwich up to her, but realized it would probably come apart in the air. He settled for reaching back and stretching out his hand.

"Come on, I won’t hurt you."

Slowly, cautiously, the girl crept down the roof toward him. Finally she was close enough to stretch out and snatch the sandwich from him. Then she scrabbled quickly back up the roof. The entire performance reminded Danny feeding a particularly shy squirrel.

"What’s your name?" he asked.

"June," the girl said around a mouthful of sandwich. "I am June."

"This is just like being at fighter practice."

Karl, Judith and several of the other team members were sitting on a low wall by the drill field watching the guardsmen practice. Under the arches of the colonnade Jerry was sitting on a bench watching girls.

Just then a flight of dragon cavalry swept over the castle.

"Okay," Karl amended, "it’s almost like being at fighter practice."

Out on the field Donal was practicing spear work against multiple opponents.

"Tricky move with the spear," Karl said to no one in particular as Donal dodged and spun between two opposing swordsmen.

"Why does he keep the butt low like that?" Judith asked.

"He is trying to keep the point directed at his opponent’s eyes," a guardsman who was lounging nearby said. "That makes it hard to judge the length of the spear."

Karl nodded. "And it sets him up to make a quick jab to the face, which will make almost anyone flinch."

The guardsman, a sandy-haired older man, looked closely at Karl. "You sound as if you know something of the art, My Lord."

"I’m a fighter. Well, an SCA fighter," he amended quickly. "We used to fight with rattan weapons. For sport."

"Would not your magic gain you more than weapons skill in war?"

"We don’t use swords and spears in war any more," Karl told him. "No, we do it strictly for fun."

The guardsman’s seamed face crinkled into a frown. "A most peculiar sport, if you do not mind my saying so, Lord."

"That’s what a lot of people in my world thought," Karl sighed. "By the way, I’m Karl Dershowitz." He extended his hand and the other man clasped it.

"I am called Shamus MacMurragh. I command the guardsmen of the castle."

"Pleased to meet you."

"Tell me," Shamus said, "how does our weapons play compare to your world?"

"Very well. We do some things a lot differently and I think we’ve spent more time on the theory than you have, but on the whole you compare very well with our methods."

"I am very glad to hear it, My Lord," Shamus said mildly. "Could you perhaps show us how you do these things."

Karl wasn’t quite sure, but he suspected he had just been trapped. "Be glad to," he said with a casualness he did not feel.

It took a few minutes to outfit Karl in the padded cloth hauberk, greaves, vambraces and helm the guardsmen used for practice. The shield they brought him was a target somewhat over two feet in diameter. Karl whose SCA fighting style depended in large part on using the points of a heater shield, felt he was at a disadvantage, but he didn’t say anything.

The sword they gave him was wood, not rattan, and a good deal heavier than what Karl was used to. Still, the balance was very good and it moved comfortably as he took practice swings.

"Remember to pull your blows, Lord," Shamus said as they faced off. "I do not want to be injured."

Karl nodded and licked his lips. Shamus moved with a catlike grace that suggested the guardsman wasn’t the one who should be worried.

Karl came in in his standard fighting stance, shield in front, sword hilt over his head with the blade forward and down, resting on his shield.

Shamus looked at him quizzically for a moment and then stepped in with two cuts to the head. Karl was strong, but his wrist could not absorb or stop the blows. His blade was knocked casually aside and Shamus’s sword rang off his helmet. Karl staggered back and nearly dropped the sword.

Shamus grasped his elbow to help support him. "Are you all right, My Lord?"

"Yeah, fine. Uh, in our system if you hit the other guy’s sword, the blow is considered blocked."

"Matters are somewhat different in our world," Shamus said dryly. "But tell me, how can you strike anyone with your sword in that position?"

"You mean down in front of the head like that? Easy. You twist your hips, drive your elbow down and throw the forearm out." He demonstrated. "Like that."

"Interesting, but is it strong enough?"

"Well, I can make someone’s helm ring pretty good with it."

"Try it on the pell," Shamus invited.

At the far end of the drill field was a row of head-high posts set in the earth. Each was about six inches thick and the dirt around them was freshly dug.

Karl stepped up to the nearest post, assumed his position and struck, overhead and slanting down and into the post. The blade turned in his hand, so the first cut only skimmed the post, scraping along the surface and taking a shaving with it. The second cut drove the sword edge perhaps two inches into the pine.

"Surprisingly strong, My Lord," Shamus commented as Karl stepped back, massaging his wrist from the shock. Then he stepped up, assumed his guard stance and sheared the post off cleanly with a single mighty swing.

"Such blows win battles," he said, stepping back.

"How did you do that?"

"Years of practice," Shamus said with a smile. "Of course there are one or two small tricks. But mostly an hour or two practice every day for, oh, six or seven years and you would be a creditable swordsman." He laughed and clapped the younger man on the shoulder.

"I think I just made a raging fool of myself," Karl muttered to Judith as he came off the field.

"I think it’s called hubris,’" Judith told him. "How’s your head?"

Karl rubbed his wrist. "It’s my arm more than any my head and it will heal quicker than my pride." He looked back out at the practicing guardsmen. "You know what the worst of it is? I can’t use any of this stuff in our combat back home. Our rules are so unrealistic that the techniques that really work won’t work for us."

"… so anyway, we’re working on a user interface. It’s going to be really neat when we get it done."

June watched Danny and said nothing.

They sat side by side on the roof, looking out over the Capital to where the late afternoon sun turned puffy clouds into a symphony of pale golds and blush pinks.

They had met up on the roof nearly every day since their first encounter. Sometimes one or both of them brought food and they had an impromptu picnic. Sometimes they just sat and talked. Or rather Danny talked and June listened. June hadn’t said a dozen words since that first day, but now they sat together on the slates. Sometimes they held hands.

"You ought to come and see the place sometime. It’s really pretty interesting."

June smiled and shook her head.

"Well, look, I gotta get down there or they’re gonna start asking questions. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?"

Danny started to rise, but June took hold of his arm and pulled him close. She kissed him full on the mouth and before Danny could respond she skittered away over the roof ridge.

Danny sat there for a moment longer, tasting her on his lips and trying to understand what had happened. One thing he was sure of. He liked it.

Even by the standards of the City of Night, this place was strange. The windows about the tower gave good light, else he never would have dared to approach the eerie blue glow issuing through the open doorway.

At this level the tower was divided into two rooms. The one beyond the carved black portal must be by far the larger, but the one was substantial as well. Looking at the layout, Wiz had the odd feeling that this level was larger inside than it was on the outside.

This was obviously a wizard’s tower and judging by the effects a very powerful wizard at that. Through the inner door Wiz could see forms writhing in the smoky red dark. It might just be fumes from the ever-burning braziers, but he had no intention of crossing the threshold to find out.

This room must have been an adjunct to the workroom. There were shelves along one wall which had obviously held scrolls. Pegs and hooks on another wall had perhaps held ceremonial robes and other magical apparatus.

But none of that was left. The small room had been thoroughly ransacked. Hangings had been pulled off the walls and lay rotting in a heap on the floor. The shelves were empty and broken. The floor was littered with broken glass, smashed crockery and bits of less savory items that might once have been in pots and jars. In one corner an armoire leaned crazily against the wall, its doors torn half off their hinges and showing the scars where someone had hastily chopped them open.

Wiz walked over to the cabinet and looked inside. The shelves were askew and the drawers were ripped apart. Like the room itself the armoire had been looted.

On an impulse, he stuck his hand into the cabinet. He struck the back much sooner than he expected and jammed his fingers painfully.

That wasn’t right, he thought as he flexed the aching digits. The back was closer than it should be. He put his hand back in the cabinet and reached around to feel the back from the outside. Yes, there was definitely a space there. There was a good eight-inch difference between the inside and outside back.

A careful examination of the inside back and the sides showed him nothing. The wood was plain and the grain straight and simple. He pressed and twisted, but the back remained in place.

Well, he thought hefting his halberd, there’s always the field engineering approach.

Three quick blows from the halberd splintered the thin wood of the back. On the third blow the armoire gave a despairing "sproing" and the remains of the back fell toward him. Eagerly Wiz reached inside.

At first he thought the compartment was empty. But when he thrust his hand into the dark recess, his fingers touched cloth. He lifted the garment off the peg on the side of the recess and brought it out into the light.

It wasn’t much, just a brown wool travelling cloak, frayed and slightly moth eaten. The kind of thing a wizard might wear for a disguise, or because he was too engrossed in his magic to worry about appearances. It doesn’t even look very warm, Wiz thought as he fingered the thin cloth. For the hundredth time Wiz thought of the fine gray and red cloak with the fur trim he had left in the village.

Well, anything was better than nothing and that’s what I’ve got now. He threw the cloak over his shoulders and pulled it tightly about him. He was right, it wasn’t very warm. Still it was comforting to have something to wrap around himself.

"I saw Moira today, My Lord," Arianne said as she and Bal-Simba finished the day’s business in his study. "She asked if there was any news of Wiz."

"If there was news, she would be the first to know," the giant wizard told his deputy. "No, so far our search has turned up nothing." He frowned. "We know an accident did not befall him in the Wild Wood. If he started out on the Wizard’s Way and did not return to the Capital, we may assume some magical agency intervened."

"Human?" Arianne asked.

"Perhaps. Although it appears that Sparrow has an unusual number of non-human enemies as well. Powerful ones." He paused for a second and frowned.

"And Lady…"

Arianne bent close at his gesture. "Yes, Lord?"

"Inquire—discreetly—into the activities of our own wizards over the last fourteen days. Especially any who have absented themselves from the Capital."

Arianne looked shocked. "Do you think…"

"I think," Bal-Simba said, cutting her off, "that we would be remiss if we did not explore every possibility to get our Sparrow back here as quickly as we can."

Arianne turned away to execute his command. "Oh, and Lady…"

Arianne turned back. "Yes, Lord?"

"Find that ex-apprentice, Pryddian, and ask him what he knows about this."

"Pryddian?"

"Just a thought. A direct attack on Wiz in the Capital would be difficult. It would be easier if he were outside our walls. Pryddian was the cause of our Sparrow’s journey." He shrugged his mountainous shoulders. "Unlikely, but we have to start somewhere."

Pryddian was sweating as he came over the last rise before his destination and not just from the noon sun. Before him the road curved to the left around the base of a hill, actually a large limestone outcropping. To the right, away from the road and along the outcropping, was a wild jumble of small trees, laurel bushes and boulders. The former apprentice started down the road, his feet kicking up powdery white dust fine as flour as he walked.

When he reached the place where the road curved away he paused for an instant and scanned the bushes on the roadside. The dusty weeds beside the road showed no sign of disturbance, but there was a path there, leading off the road and in among the undergrowth. Pryddian patted the breast of his tunic for reassurance and then stepped off the road and onto the little-used path.

He breasted his way through the bushes, dodged around trees and boulders and followed the meandering path deeper into the woodland. The thick brush and second-growth trees showed that once this place had been logged. But that had obviously been long ago. Getting felled trees out of such a place would be backbreaking and not worth it so close to the Fringe of the Wild Wood. It had been done once and then the wilderness had been allowed to reclaim this place.

Finally the trail took a sharp turn and a dip and Pryddian stumbled through into an opening. He was against the flank of the hill now, in a little hollow hard against sheer rock face. All around him like grotesque sentries stood boulders twice as high as he was. Directly in front of him was a single table-high stone in the midst of a patch of beaten earth. There were dark splotches on the stone, as if something had been spilled there and allowed to dry.

Pryddian walked hesitatingly into the place. Suddenly an arm like iron clamped across his windpipe and he felt cold steel against his neck.

Instinctively he twisted his head and out of the corner of his eye saw that his captor was clad in the close fitting black of the Dark League’s dread Shadow Warriors.

The Shadow Warrior pressed the edge to his throat and Pryddian ceased struggling.

"No move, no sound if you value your life," a voice grated behind him.

Pryddian licked his lips and remained silent.

"Better," the voice said at last. "Now, why are you here?"

"I am called Pryddian. I am… URK." The Shadow Warrior’s grip tightened on his windpipe.

"I did not ask who you were, but why you had come," his unseen questioner said sharply. "Answer only those questions I ask you, apprentice, or you will wish you had never been born."

"I came seeking the Dark League," Pryddian said when the pressure on his throat relaxed.

"And why should the dark League be interested in the likes of you?"

"I have talent. I desire to become a wizard and I bring you something." He reached toward his tunic, but the Shadow Warrior drew the blade perhaps a quarter of an inch along his skin. He felt the burning sting of the cut and then the warm wetness of blood trickling down his throat.

Pryddian froze, but the Shadow Warrior, reacting to an unseen signal, slackened his grip and moved the knife away from his throat. Slowly he extended his trembling hand and reached into his tunic. Equally slowly he withdrew his hand, holding a roll of parchment.

"I give you the Sparrow’s magic," he said.

"Lord, Moira asked again today about Sparrow," Arianne said.

Bal-Simba turned away from his window to face his deputy.

"Today as every day, eh?" He shook his head. "The answer is still the same. We can find no trace of him, in all the World."

"Is he dead then?" Arianne asked.

Bal-Simba shook his head. "Moira does not think so. I trust her judgment in this."

"Moira was away in his world when he left Aelric’s hold," Arianne pointed out.

"Still, I think she would know if he had died."

"Then where could he be?"

"There are many possibilities. He might be in a place where he is shielded by magic. He might have been sent beyond the World. He might be held in a state of undeath.

"One thing I think we can safely venture. He is not where he is voluntarily and wherever he is, he needs any aid we can give him." He returned to his desk an sat down again. "On that subject, have you learned more in the matter you were pursuing?"

"You mean the actions of the Mighty? There is one thing new. Ebrion is missing for near three weeks."

"Ebrion?"

Arianne nodded. "There is more. We cannot be sure, but it appears that he may well be dead."

"Dead? How?"

Arianne shrugged. "We do not know. We are not even certain that he is dead."

Bal-Simba sucked his lip against his sharpened teeth thoughtfully. "Ebrion, eh?"

He twisted in his chair to face her. "This should be explored. Investigate closely."

"But discreetly," Arianne agreed. "I am already doing so, Lord."

Just like all the rest, Wiz thought as he surveyed the room in the failing light. Nothing to eat, just more piles of junk. The wind whistled through the broken windows and he shivered as he pulled the worn brown cloak tighter around himself.

Outside the setting sun poked fitfully through the layer of lead-gray clouds. By now Wiz knew the signs of a storm moving in, perhaps with snow. It was going to be another cold, miserable night. Too cold for foraging.

Since his encounter with the flying wizard, Wiz had stayed out of the open, at least in daylight. Every day, unless the winds were too high, one or more wizards of the Dark League floated over the ruined city looking for a sign of him. Now he tried to move from building to building only at night.

Well, none of that this evening. Storms in the Southern Land were nothing to take lightly. He needed a place to hole up. And food, of course.

He made one more survey of the room. Broken furniture, bits of smashed crockery and junk, and piles of what had probably once been wall hangings or drapes.

He poked at the largest pile, over against the far wall with his broken halberd. Nothing but cloth.

Then he stopped in mid-poke. Maybe he could use this after all. There was a lot more of it here than normal and it was pretty dry. More than enough to make a nest for a human.

Wiz burrowed into the pile of cloth and rolled himself in the rags. He pulled up the hood of his cloak and drew another layer of cloth over him. The material was none too clean. It had been soaked repeatedly and Wiz was not the first creature to nest in it, but it kept out the chill and as his body heat warmed the cloth, Wiz stopped being cold for the first time since he had arrived. As the wind whistled and howled outside, his breathing steadied and he fell deeply asleep for the first time in days.

Voices woke him the next morning. Human voices in the same room.

Beneath the hood of the cloak he could see two men had entered the chamber—men who wore the black robes of the Dark League.

"He is here," the older one protested, "I can smell him!" He cast about like a hunting dog, his head turning this way and that as if he actually was smelling Wiz out.

"He was here," the other one corrected. "Do you see him in the room? Or do you think he has acquired a cloak of invisibility?"

Wiz dared not breathe.

The balding wizard straightened up. "This is foolishness anyway. Why not use spells to find this Sparrow? I have stood in his presence and I could locate him in minutes, even if Dzhir Kar could not."

The other waved a hand airily. "Oh, but that would not be sporting. Our Dread Master desires to have his amusement with this alien wizard before he dies. Think of it as a little something to pay him back for all that he has cost us." He smacked his lips and his eyes sparkled. "And would it not be delicious to have this one slain by magic, unable to use magic in his own defense? You have to admit, Seklos, it has a certain piquancy to it."

"Piquancy be damned! That—creature is dangerous and should be destroyed immediately. Do you play with a louse before you crack it between your fingers?" He looked narrowly at his companion. "Well, you might. And so might he. But it is still foolishness."

The younger wizard shook his head. "No sporting blood. That’s your problem, Seklos, you’ve got no sporting blood at all."

"What I’ve got," the older wizard said, "is a cold from tramping all over this pest-bedamned city. If it weren’t for that, I could smell him even more sharply. Now come on. Let’s see if we can track him down and end this charade."

He strode out through the other door with his companion still trailing behind, smiling tolerantly.

It was several minutes after they left that Wiz could even shiver.

Thank God I don’t snore! Wiz thought numbly.

For a long time after they left, Wiz stayed huddled in the rags. His bladder was full to bursting, but he did not abandon his shelter for nearly an hour after the wizards left.

They still should have seen me, he thought as he wiggled out of his cocoon. He had been snuggled into the pile of cloth, but he hadn’t been completely hidden. The storm had passed during the night and light in the room had been bright enough. But still the wizards had missed him completely.

He paused and listened at the door. The hall was empty and there was no sign or sound of the wizards who had come so close to him. It was full daylight now so he looked around one more time. The only thing he had missed was a cracked and broken mirror hanging askew on the wall. Most of the glass was missing, but the piece that remained reflected back the empty room.

Only it’s not empty! I’m here. He looked closely at the mirror. The mirror fragment showed the room, but there was no sign of Wiz. It was as if he was not there.

A cloak of invisibility! That was why the magicians hadn’t seen him. He looked in the mirror again, turning this way and that and admiring his lack of reflection.

He’d heard about cloaks of invisibility, but he had never seen one. What was it Moira called it? A tarncape. That was what he had found. He laughed aloud and spun in a full circle, the cloak standing out from his body from the speed.

Then he froze. Magic! Wiz thought, his heart pounding, I’ve been using magic! But the demon hadn’t come for him. He hadn’t even felt the quiver he felt when he tried to frame a spell.

Wiz slumped into the corner, his back against the cold stone wall, and tried to think. What was it the wizard had said?

Of course! The demon wasn’t looking for him, it was looking for the kind of magic he made. He knew that the output of his spell compiler "felt" different from normal magic, probably because each of his large spells was built up on many smaller spells—the "words" in his magic language.

But the tarncape wasn’t magic he had made. It was someone else’s magic he had found. It didn’t register with the demon even when he used it. And that meant that he could use magic after all! Provided it was magic not of his making.

Wiz thought about it, but he didn’t see how that helped much. Obviously most of the magical items in the City of Night had been carried off in the chaos that followed the Dark League’s defeat. There were undoubtedly some things left, but he didn’t know how to use them and magical implements did not come with users manuals. Worse, he wasn’t a wizard in the conventional sense. He had no training in the usual forms of magic so he probably wouldn’t recognize a magical object unless it bit him on the ankle.

Still, he thought, fingering the cloak, there ought to be something I can do with this.

The garden was beautiful this early, Moira thought. The sun painted the towers of the Wizards’ Keep golden and made the colors of the pennons leap out against the blue of the sky. The dew still filmed the plants and made diamond sparkles on the grass and the occasional spider web. The air was cool and perfumed with the fragrance of roses.

Moira plucked a yellow one off the bush. Wiz had liked yellow roses on her. He thought they looked good against her red hair and fair skin and he especially liked her to wear them in her hair.

What was it he had told her? Some custom in his world where a woman wore a rose over the left ear to show she was taken and the right ear to show she was available. Or was it the other way around?

Moira smiled at the memory and bit her lip to keep from crying.

A shadow fell over her. She gasped and whirled to see Bal-Simba.

"Oh, Lord, you startled me. Merry met."

"Merry met, Lady."

"Is there any news?"

"None, I am afraid, but it is a related errand that brings me to you. Do you recall the three-demon searching spell Wiz created to seek news of you? I mentioned it to Jerry today and he says they have found no trace of such a spell in Wiz’s notes."

Moira frowned. "None? I could have sworn he had something, at least the copies on parchment of the wooden slabs he wrote on at Heart’s Ease when he created the spell."

"Jerry says there is nothing in the material he has. Is there anything they missed?"

The hedge witch shook her head.

"Nothing." Then she brightened. "But Lord, what about the searching system Wiz set up to find me? Could we not direct the searching demons to seek out Wiz?"

"We thought of that," Bal-Simba told her. "But it appears that the spell requires constant attention. The small searchers, the ones like wisps of dirty fog, are easily blown about by the wind. The larger ones drift as well, given time. A year’s storms have scattered the demons beyond recall."

"And without the spell we cannot recreate the work." Unconsciously she crushed the rose in her grasp.

"Wait a minute! Lord, what about the spell Wiz used to find me in the dungeon?" Moira asked. "The Rapid Reconnaissance Direction Demon?"

Bal-Simba slapped his thigh and the sound rang off the walls. "Of course! It could search the entire World in hours."

A quick survey of the notes in the Bull Pen turned up the spell. With Jerry and several of the other programmers who hadn’t yet turned in at their heels, Moira and Bal-Simba went out into the courtyard to put the spell in operation.

"Now then," Bal-Simba said to himself as he flipped between the pages where the spell was written, alternate lines on each page to prevent activating the spell by writing it down. "Hmmm, ah. Yes, very well." He faced into the courtyard, squinted into the morning sun and raised one hand.

"class drone grep wiz," he commanded in a ringing voice. There was soft "pop" and a squat demon appeared in the courtyard. Its cylindrical body was white, its domed top was blue and it supported itself on three stubby legs. "exe!" commanded Bal-Simba.

The demon emitted a despairing honk and fell forward on its face. A thin trickle of smoke curled out of its innards.

"Let me see that spell again," Bal-Simba said to Moira.

Three repetitions produced no better results. Once the demon simply froze, once it flashed off never to return and once it ran around in tight little circles emitting little beeps and squawks. At last Jerry listed out the spell to see if he could discover the difficulty.

"I think I see what’s wrong," Jerry said finally. "But it’s not going to be easy to fix."

"What is the problem?" Bal-Simba asked.

"The problem is that this code wasn’t written for anyone else to use."

"You mean this spell is protected by magic?" Moira frowned. Such protections were not unknown on powerful spells.

"Worse," Jerry said glumly. "This code is protected by being write-only."

"Eh?" said Bal-Simba.

"Wiz hacked this thing together to do a specific job, right? From the looks of it he was in a tremendous hurry when he did it."

"I was a prisoner of the Dark League," Moira said in a small voice. "He wrote the spell to find me."

"Okay, he needed it fast. He never expected that anyone else would use it, he used the quickest, dirtiest methods he could find, he didn’t worry about conforming to his language specification and he didn’t bother commenting on it at all." Jerry looked at the glowing letters again and shook his head. "I don’t think he could have understood this stuff a month after he wrote it and I don’t have the faintest idea what is going on here."

"This," he said pointing to a single line of half a dozen symbols, "apparently does about four different things. Either that or it’s some kind of weird jump instruction." He scowled at the code for a minute. "Anyway, the whole program is like that. I don’t see three lines in a row any place in this that I understand."

"We do not need to understand the spell," Bal-Simba rumbled. "We only need to use it this once."

Jerry shook his head. "It’s not that simple. What are the commands? What are the options you can use? How is it all supposed to work? You already tried this and it failed. Until we understand it we won’t know why it failed."

"How long will it take you to find out?"

Jerry shrugged.

"I don’t know. The hardest part of a job like this is always getting your head cranked around to see the other guy’s way of doing things. Once you do that, sometimes it just falls right into place." He frowned. "And sometimes not. Anyway, I’ll put a couple of people on it. I wouldn’t count on being able to use this any time soon, though."

"Hopes raised and dashed before breakfast," Bal-Simba said as they walked across the courtyard. "I am sorry, My Lady. I thought surely we had found the answer."

Moira clenched her jaw and held her head high. Bal-Simba saw she was crying. "There is still one thing we may try," she said tightly. "I will go to Duke Aelric and plead for his help."

Bal-Simba stopped dead. "What?"

"Elven magic is much more powerful than human. Surely they can find him."

"I was under the impression that duke Aelric was already looking for Wiz."

"Then we can share what we know."

"Dealing with elves is dangerous," Bal-Simba said neutrally.

Moira flicked a grim little smile. "Madness, you mean. But Aelric seems to have a fondness for Wiz and I think he might listen to me."

"I ought to forbid you to do this."

Moira resumed walked. "Forbid away. But do not expect me to heed you."

The hill managed to be peaceful and foreboding at the same time. The moonlight played down on the wooded knoll, silvering the leaves of the trees and the grassy clearing before them.

But the moon also caught the megalith standing at the base of the hill where woods met grass. Three great stones, two upright and one laid across them like the lintel of a door. Was it only a trick of the moonlight that made the shadows within stir?

Moira licked her lips and pressed them firmly together. In spite of her cloak she was chill and she did not think the warm summer night had much to do with it. She took a firmer grip on her staff and strode boldly into the clearing.

"I wish to speak to Duke Aelric," she said loudly.

There was no response, no movement. The hill lay in the moonlight exactly as it had. Moira thought of repeating her request and decided against it. Elves were a touchy breed and much consumed with politeness. A human thought pushy or demanding would be in dire trouble.

"My Lady."

Moira jumped. Duke Aelric was standing in the moonlight in front of her. He wore a white doublet and hose embroidered with silver that glinted in the moonlight and a hip-length cloak of pale blue.

He regarded her with interest but without the warmth he had showed the last time they had met. Nor did it escape her notice that the elf duke had not welcomed her, merely acknowledged her presence.

She licked her lips. "My Lord, we need your help in finding Wiz."

Aelric arched a silver brow. "An elf helping mortals? An odd notion, Lady."

"It has been known to happen."

He gestured languidly. "So it has, when it is sufficiently amusing. I fail to see the amusement here."

That was the end of it then, Moira acknowledged as a cold lump congealed in her stomach. When Wiz and Moira had first met Aelric, she had told him that elves acted for their own reasons and no mortal was ever likely to untangle them. Standing here in the moonlight with the elf duke she began to appreciate how true that was.

Moira took a deep breath and gathered all her courage. "Lord, forgive me for mentioning this, but is it not true that your honor is involved as well? Wiz did disappear while travelling from your hold."

Aelric gave her a look that made her go weak in the knees. For a horrible instant she thought she had offended the elf.

"My honor is my own concern," he said coldly, "and not a matter for discussion with mortals. I know who kidnapped him and at the proper time they will feel the weight of my displeasure."

"But you will not help us find Wiz."

Again the chilling, haughty gaze. "Child, do you presume to instruct me?"

"No, Lord."

"Then guard your tongue more carefully." Duke Aelric softened slightly. "Besides, I cannot find him."

He smiled frostily. "That surprises you? It surprises me as well—and tells me that others besides mortals had a hand in this." He motioned fluidly, as if brushing away a fly. "However that is my concern, not yours."

"But you know who kidnapped him?"

"That too is my concern. Little one, among the ever-living revenge is artifice most carefully constructed and sprung only at the proper moment. These ones have offended me and they shall feel the weight of my displeasure at the proper time."

With a sinking feeling Moira realized that to an elf, "the proper time" could mean years—or centuries.

"Now if you will excuse me." He sketched a bow and Moira dropped a curtsey. When she looked up she was alone in the clearing.

Dzhir Kar eyed the man in front of him skeptically.

"So you bring us the Sparrow’s magic?" he said coldly.

"Yes, Lord," Pryddian said. One of the wizards holding him jabbed him sharply in the kidney with his staff. Pryddian gasped and jerked under the influence of the pain spell.

"Yes, master," he corrected himself. "I stole it from the Sparrow himself."

Pryddian was very much the worse for wear. Once he had been passed on to the Dark League’s hidden lair he had been questioned. Since the questioning had been merely "rigorous" rather than "severe" he still had all his body parts and could still function. But his back was bruised and bloody, one eye was swollen shut and he was missing a few teeth. It had taken nearly three days before the wizards who had remained behind were convinced he was worth passing on to their master. His trip south had been expeditious rather than comfortable. Now he waited in the arms of his captors for the misshapen creature before him to decide his fate.

Dzhir Kar considered. It was not unknown for apprentices to decide the Dark League offered them more scope than the Northern wizards—rare, but not unheard of. Still, this was neither the time nor the place to add apprentices, especially ones so recently allied with the North. A quiet dagger between the ribs would have been the normal response to such presumption.

But still, a spell of the Sparrow’s…

"What is this thing?" he asked, flipping through the parchments.

"It is a searching spell. The Sparrow used it to scan the world. It involves three kinds of demons, you see, and…" Pryddian gasped again as the wizard prodded him with the pain spell.

"Confine yourself to answering my questions," Dzhir Kar said.

"A searching spell," Pryddian gasped out. "It can search the whole World in a single day."

Dzhir Kar thought quickly. This just might be the answer to his problem. A host of demons could search the City of Night far better than his wizards could. He had a limited ability to train his demon to ignore specific instances of Sparrow’s magic. If it could be trained to ignore these demons, then the combination of the Sparrow’s own magic and his demon could do in a single day what his wizards had been unable to do in a matter of weeks.

He waved his hands and the guards released Pryddian and stood away. The ex-apprentice slumped to the floor, his legs unable to support him.

"Very well," Dzhir Kar said. "It amuses me to use the Sparrow’s magic to track him down. If you can produce these demons as you say then I will give you your life. Moreover, if they can find the Sparrow, you will be accepted as a novice by the Dark League.

"If you cannot do these things, I will see to it that you suffer for your presumption." He looked up at the wizards. "Take him away."

He nodded to the guards and they half-carried, half-dragged Pryddian out.

They gave Pryddian a cell just off the main workroom and he set out to duplicate Wiz’s searching system. It was not a simple matter for an untutored ex-apprentice to unravel the notes he had stolen. Nor was it easy to cast the spells once he learned them. The Sparrow seemed to delight in alternate choices at every step of the spell and the wrong choices did little or nothing. But Pryddian worked until he dropped. His black-robed jailers saw to that with their pain spells.

It might have amused him to know he was not the only person having trouble with the Sparrow’s spells.

"This guy was a real hacker," Mike said, leaning over his wife’s shoulder to study their latest task.

Nancy nodded and looked back at the code above her desk. "You don’t have to tell me that. Jesus! I’ve seen better commented programs in BASIC." She took another look at the runes glowing blue before her. "And I’ve seen clearer comments in the London Times crossword puzzle!" She jabbed her finger at one line.

"What the hell is this monstrosity? And why the hell did he name it corned__beef?"

"Jerry says the name is probably some kind of rotten pun. What does it do?"

"Basically it takes the value of the characters of a demon’s name, multiplies them by a number, adds another number and then divides the result by 65,353. Then it uses that result as a subscript in some kind of an array." She shook her head again. "Why 65,353? Jesus! You know, if this guy doesn’t come back we may never understand some of this stuff."

The man sighed. "Well, let’s get to it. This is going to take a while." He nodded to Wiz’s book of notes on his magic compiler. "Hand me the Dragon Book, will you?"

Ghost-gray and insubstantial, the searching demons began to pour from the ruined tower and blanket the City of Night.

Each demon had very little power. It could only absorb impressions from the world around it and forward them to a larger demon which would catalog them. The final step in the process was a demon formed like a weird crystal construct that perched atop the tower. It did the final sorting and alerted the wizards if it found anything that looked worthwhile.

Wiz had endowed the demons with all the mortal senses, but no magical ones. Of those senses, sight was the most important to an airborne creature. Since Wiz wore his tarncape constantly there was little visible sign of him. Demons by the thousands searched every nook and cranny of the city, but they saw nothing of Wiz.

Dzhir Kar ground his teeth in fury at the news and ordered Pryddian beaten to make him fix the spell. But Pryddian could not repair what he did not understand and in spite of the demons Wiz eluded the Dark League.

Sixteen: Trouble in the North

Dragon Leader looked back over the flight in satisfaction. They weren’t parade-perfect, but their spacing was good. Even his wingman was keeping his proper distance and holding position on the turns.

As he moved in easy rhythm with his mount’s wing beats, he surveyed the forest below. The trees were dark green in their late summer foliage and the pattern was broken here and there by the lighter green of a natural meadow or the twisting channel of a brown stream wandering among the trees. This far north there were a lot of streams because the land got a lot of rain.

Today’s patrol had had good weather all day, thank goodness, and if he was any judge of weather, tomorrow would be fair as well. Only a few clouds, all of them high enough still to be tinted golden by the setting sun—and scattered enough not to provide shelter for possible ambushers, Dragon Leader thought.

No likelihood of that, of course. There were no more enemy dragons. This was simply a routine patrol over the northernmost reaches of the human lands—a pleasant summer’s excursion for men and dragons alike.

Dragon Leader gave a hand signal and applied gentle knee pressure to his mount’s neck. As his dragon swept around to the right the three other dragons in the flight followed, speeding up to hold their relative position. He noticed that his wingman held almost exactly the right distance and speed.

The kid’s shaping up, he thought as the dragons swept over a heavily wooded ridge, so low they startled a flock of brightly colored birds out of one of the taller trees. He’ll have his own squadron yet.

But that was for the future. Just over the next ridge was the Green River and on a bluff above a wide looping bend sat Whitewood Grove, the northernmost of the settlements and their destination for the night.

It didn’t have a full aerie, but there was a covered roosting ground for the dragons and snug quarters with their own bath for the riders. Right about now, Dragon Leader reflected, that sounded pretty good.

Again the dragons swept up over a ridge, buoyed by the upwelling currents of air. Dragon Leader started to signal another wide turn to line up on the village. Then he froze in mid-gesture.

What in the…

There was the river and a bluff, but there was no village there. Instead the rise was crowned by a grove of large trees.

Could they be that far off course? Unlikely. Although the people of the World did not use maps as the term is commonly understood—the Law of Similarity made any map a magical instrument—they did have lists of landmarks. Dragon Leader had been checking them automatically and they had hit each landmark in turn. Besides, he had been to Whitewood Grove many times. He recognized the shape of the bluff, the bend in the river and the rapids just downstream. He even saw a snag near shore he recalled from his last visit. Everything was exactly as it should be except the village was missing.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled and his mouth tasted of metal. Suddenly Dragon Leader was very, very alert.

Without using his communications crystal he signaled his flight to break into pairs. A wave of his arm sent the second pair climbing and circling wide around the area. Then with his wingman following he bored straight in to pass over the place where the village should be.

Splitting his forces like this was bad tactics and Dragon Leader didn’t like it at all. But if he hadn’t made a stupid mistake, then whatever had caused this was probably more than a match for four dragons. Splitting into pairs increased the chances that someone would get word back to the Council. For the first time since the patrol began, Dragon Leader wished he had an entire squadron of a dozen dragons behind him instead of a single flight of four.

They came in low and fast over the bluff, nearly brushing the tops of the trees. It appeared a perfectly ordinary grove of Whitewood trees. This was definitely the spot, but there was no sign of a village. No buildings, no ruins, not even any footpaths. He signaled his wingman and they swept back over the spot, quartering the site.

The village of Whitewood Grove was simply gone. The wharf was gone from the river and even the path that led from the wharf to the village was missing.

They circled the site while Dragon Leader considered. There was nothing on any checklist that applied to a situation like this. Looking over his shoulder at the place where the village of Whitewood Grove should have been, he made a decision.

"Second element, run for the patrol base," he said into his communications crystal. "Fly all night if you have to and as soon as you are over the ridge start reporting to the Capital. Wingman, stay on perimeter patrol. I am going to land and inspect the site on foot. If I am not back in the air in one half of a day-tenth, run for the patrol base. Now go!"

To his right and high above he saw the second element break off and scoot for the ridge. He waited until they were across before he turned his dragon inward toward the bluff.

There was barely room to land a dragon on the very tip of the bluff. The air currents off the river made it tricky and his dragon didn’t like the place at all. She bridled and growled and tried to break off the approach twice. He had to force her down and once on the ground she would not settle. She kept her wings half-spread and her neck extended high in the classic fighting posture. The way she was breathing told Dragon Leader she was building up for an enormous gout of flames.

Which was fine with Dragon Leader. An aroused dragon is far from the worst thing to have at your back in a tight spot.

Sword in hand, he scanned the trees while keeping close to the dragon’s bulk. The grove of Whitewoods looked peaceful and quite unremarkable. The early evening sun tinged their glossy green leaves with gold. A slight breeze gently rustled through the branches. Somewhere a bird sang and close to the grove’s edge a red squirrel jumped from branch to branch. The grove exuded the faint, sweet aroma of Whitewood blossoms.

None of which made Dragon Leader or his dragon feel any more secure. The dragon stayed poised for combat and on cat feet Dragon Leader moved into the wood.

The Whitewoods were fully mature, large enough that he could not have put his arms around them at their base. The litter on the forest floor was deep with dead leaves and rotting vegetation. There were ferns and there were many apples and here and there a purple forest orchid. But there was not the least little sign of anything that might possibly have once marked human habitation.

Warily Dragon Leader moved out of the grove, keeping watch over his shoulder as if he expected something to pounce on him at any minute. As quickly as he could he mounted, wheeled his dragon and launched her off the bluff. The dragon dived for the river to gain air speed and Dragon Leader finished securing himself to the saddle on the fly. As his wingman came up to join him and the pair ran south for the patrol base, he realized his jerkin was soaked with sweat.

For the first time since the war with the Dark League ended, Dragon Leader was very, very frightened.

Arianne gasped when Bal-Simba told her of the dragon rider’s report.

"Lord, what could have caused this?"

"I have not the slightest idea," Bal-Simba told her. "I have never heard of such a thing."

The blonde witch thought hard for a moment. "How many others know of this?"

"In the Capital? So far just two Watchers, you and I."

"Then if I may suggest Lord, perhaps it would be best if we kept it a secret for now."

Bal-Simba nodded. "The Watchers are already sworn to secrecy. But that does not help us get our people back—if they can be gotten back. Nor will it prevent such things in the future."

"Such an attack must have been provoked by the changes on the Fringe," Arianne said slowly. "Else this would have happened before."

"Once again, my thinking. But what provoked it? And what was provoked?"

"Perhaps the elves could tell us."

Bal-Simba snorted like a bull. "You grasp at straws." Then his expression softened. "Besides, I have climbed all over that notion and can find no way in. The elves will have nothing to do with any mortal except Wiz. And even if they would, I doubt I could convince them of our sincerity."

"Will not your word suffice as president of the Council of the North?" Arianne asked him.

"You know the answer to that, Lady," Bal-Simba rumbled. "I am not the mightiest magician among us, and the Council’s power ebbs as people realize they do not stand in constant need of us. Wiz may be the most junior member of the Council, but he is our most powerful magician and our best hope for correcting what is wrong."

Arianne shuddered. "So if we do not find him, we face war."

"We must do more than find him, Lady," Bal-Simba said. "We must find him alive and sound."

Seventeen: Everything Wild

"Okay, deal."

Karl, Judith, Mike and Nancy were seated around the table in the Wizard’s Day Room, settling in for a quiet session of bridge. Ignoring the glares of the half-dozen or so wizards present, they had pulled a table from its accustomed place and brought chairs in around it.

Mike opened a fresh pack of cards and dealt the first hand with his wife Nancy as the dummy.

Nancy organized her hand and frowned. Every card she held was a heart. By some weird happenstance, she had drawn the entire suite of hearts!

"Damn, what a time to be dummy!"

Then she looked up and saw the strange expressions on the other players’ faces.

"What’s wrong?"

Wordlessly, Mike laid down his hand, face up. Karl and Judith followed suit. Mike had gotten every club, Judith had all the diamonds and Karl had all the spades.

"Jesus!" Nancy breathed. "Are you sure you shuffled those cards?"

"You saw me," Karl said. "My lord! I wonder what the odds are on that happening?"

"Astronomical," Judith said softly. "Simply astronomical."

They all looked at the cards for a minute.

"Well," Mike said finally. "Let’s shuffle and get down to play."

He raked in the four hands and took great care to shuffle the deck thoroughly. Then he dealt them out again.

Nancy picked up her hand, looked at them, and threw them down. "Shit," she said informatively.

The others followed suit. This time Nancy had gotten all the clubs, Karl had the diamonds, Mike had the hearts and Judith had the spades.

"This isn’t working," Karl said finally. "Somehow the magic in this place is interfering with the shuffle." He looked at the four piles of cards on the table and made a face. "Do you still want to play?"

"If we can find something that we can play," Judith said. "I don’t think bridge is going to do it."

"How about poker?" Mike asked. "We could play for matches or something."

"I don’t really know how to play poker," Judith protested.

"We’ll make it easy," Mike told her. "Five-card draw."

This time Karl shuffled the cards and dealt the first hand. Then he picked up his cards and looked at them.

The hand was assorted, but it was a dog. Not even a pair and no card higher than a five. Well, that was okay too. Karl played poker for the long haul and the first hand of the game was a good place to find out how the other players would react to a bluff.

Suddenly the top of his head felt wet.

Karl looked up and saw that a tiny thundercloud, no bigger than his hand, had formed above his head. A miniature bolt of lightning flashed from peak to fluffy gray peak and a fine mist of rain settled on him.

"Let me guess," Nancy said. "You got the low hand."

Karl threw down his cards in disgust. "I don’t think this universe is designed for card playing."

"Wait a minute," Mike said. "Let’s try something that’s more strategy and less pure luck of the draw. You ever played Texas Hold ’em?"

"That’s a version of seven-card stud isn’t it?" Karl asked.

"I don’t know," Judith said. "I’ve never played stud poker."

"It’s easy," Nancy told her. "You deal three cards to each player and four face down in the middle of the table. You try to make the best hand with the cards in your hand and the four on the table. You bet after the deal and then again after each card is turned. I’ll help you with the first hand, if you like."

"And," Mike continued, "it’s got the advantage that the outcome depends on the cards on the table more than the cards in your hand. That and your betting skill."

They had no chips, and matchsticks were not a part of this world, but they appropriated a bowl of unshelled nuts from the sideboard by the port, ignoring the audible sniffs of the wizards.

Again Mike shuffled the cards and dealt.

"Three filberts."

"I’ll see your filberts and raise you a brazil nut," Judith said. She looked at the zebra-striped nut in her hand. "At least I think it’s a brazil nut."

"What did we say, five pecans to a brazil nut?" asked Nancy, shoving into the pile of squirrel fodder.

"Ace," Mike said, flipping the card. "Place your bets."

They went around the table with everyone betting moderately. Mike reached out and flipped the second card.

"Ace again."

Nancy made a strangled sound.

"What’s wrong?" her husband asked.

"Just keep going," Nancy said, staring at the cards.

Again everyone bet and again Mike flipped a card.

"Another ace… wait a minute!"

There on the table face up were an ace of clubs and ace of diamonds. The last card was the ace of spades.

"What the hell…"

He pulled a card from his hand and threw it face up on the table. An ace of spades.

"That makes seven aces," Nancy said, throwing down her and Judith’s hands.

"No, nine," Karl said, adding his cards to the pile.

"Ten," Mike said bitterly, adding another ace from his hand. "Come on guys, let’s go watch the sunset or something."

Over in the corner Malus and Honorious watched them leave.

"What do you suppose that was all about?"

"Obviously a divination of some sort." He shook his head. "I do not think they like the outcome."

"I wonder what it portends?" said Agricolus coming over to join them.

"Nothing good, I warrant you," said Juvian from his seat near the window. "I thought the Sparrow was bad with his strange magics and alien ways. Now we have near a score of them and they are all more fey than the Sparrow ever was."

"And they left the table and chairs out of place," Honorious snapped, ringing a silver bell to summon a servant to put them back. "Encroaching mushrooms. No manners at all."

"It is a plague! A veritable plague," Agricolus said.

Juvian, Malus and Honorious all nodded in glum agreement.

"Worse than that, perhaps," said Petronus, a wizard with thinning hair and a pronounced widow’s peak, sitting apart from the others. "How much do we know of what these strangers do?"

"They have explained…" Agricolus started.

"Did you understand the explanation?"

"Well…"

"Just so. They labor endlessly in the very citadel of the North and foist us off with explanations none can understand. Meanwhile non-mortals everywhere prepare against us."

"Do you think something is amiss?" asked Malus.

"And you do not? We stand on the brink of a war of extermination that is somehow bound up with the Sparrow and we let his cohorts work in our very midst doing things they will not explain." He slapped his hand on his knee with a sharp crack. "If these strangers are so powerful, let them give us clear proof and reasonable explanations. As members of the Council of the North we should demand it of them."

"That would be a task for the president of the Council," Agricolus said.

"And I mean to talk to him about it. Now." He rose and bowed to his fellows. "My Lords." With that he swept out of the room.

"He does have a point," Honorious said, lowering his voice as the servant came into the Day Room and started moving the furniture back. "They should not hide what they are doing from us."

"I am not sure they are hiding from us," Malus said slowly.

"Do you mean you believe that rubbish, that, that ’spell compiler’?" Honorious snorted. "If so, I have an elixir of Immortality I wish to discuss with you."

The pudgy little wizard frowned. "I did not believe it when there was just the Sparrow and his wild talk. But now? All these newcomers can work magic, all their magic feels like the Sparrow’s."

"They are all from his land," Agricolus pointed out.

"And they all claim that anyone can learn this magic," Malus countered. "Perhaps they are telling the truth."

"If they are telling the truth then why can not any of us grasp the essence of this thing?" Agricolus demanded.

"Perhaps we have not tried hard enough," Malus said. "We can hardly be said to have approached the Sparrow’s magic with the same openness we would apply to learning a new spell from one of the Mighty."

Honorious snorted again.

"Well," the little wizard said, "I do not put it forward as fact, only as speculation." He put both hands on the arms of his chair and levered himself erect. "My Lords, I must return to my own work."

"There may be something in what he says," Agricolus said after a moment.

"Fortuna!" exclaimed Honorious. "Not you too?"

Agricolus shrugged. "I pride myself on having an open mind."

"And I find myself in a world gone mad!" Honorious retorted, ostentatiously picking up the scroll he had laid aside when the conversation began.

"My Lord, I think we have a problem," Moira told Karl when she found him in the Bull Pen the next morning.

"You mean another problem," he said looking up from the stack of wood strips he was pawing through. "What now? Can’t you get us more parchment?"

"No, not that—although that will be a problem if your people don’t start using slates for simple notes. This is more serious, I think."

"Won’t it wait until Jerry gets in, eh? Well, lay it on me."

"Some members of the Council have formally petitioned to have your work stopped until they are satisfied that what you do is safe and effective." She made a face. "Forever, in other words."

"But why?"

"Oh, many reasons. Jealousy is one of them. Some of the Council fears any change. But mostly I think because none of them understand what you do."

"But they must have some idea. I thought Wiz had been teaching classes all along."

"Oh, he was. That is part of the problem. Your magic is so complicated and your ways of thinking so alien none of our wizards were able to learn what Wiz tried to teach them.

"Some of them claim his teaching was a smoke screen, designed to hide the real secret of his magic. But I know that is not so. He struggled hard to teach us and none of us could learn."

Jerry tapped a scroll thoughtfully against his cheek. "Well, programming sure isn’t the easiest thing around, but it’s not near that hard."

"For you perhaps. For us even the simplest things dissolve into confusion."

"Give me an example."

Moira paused and frowned. Very prettily, Karl thought. For the hundredth time he regretted she was taken.

"Well, there are these variables that are named one thing, called another thing and have a value of something else. Wiz must have explained that to me once a moon and I still don’t think I understand it."

"Oh boy, I’m not surprised at that one," Karl told her. "It’s near the trickiest notion in programming and it’s something that confuses a lot of people. But it’s still not that hard for someone who’s got what it takes to be a wizard."

"Very well then," Moira said. "Can you explain it to me?"

Karl sighed. The clearest explanation he had ever seen n the subject started with a quotation from Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland—and the quotation was very apt.

He thought for a minute.

"Okay, look," he said. "You have a true name, right? A name that is uniquely yours and must be kept secret because it identifies you exactly?"

Moira thought for a moment and decided to ignore the rude and prying nature of the question. "I do," she admitted.

"But your true name isn’t ’Moira,’ is it? Moira’s just what people call you?"

"Yes."

"And most people address you as ’Lady’ because you’re a witch. That is, you belong to the class of witches, right?"

"Yes," said Moira, who was beginning to see where this led.

"All right then," Karl said. "You are named one thing, you are called something else and you’re an instantiation of a class called yet another thing." He grinned. "Then you get someone like Wiz, who is Sparrow to most people, Wiz to his friends, is an instantiation of the class of magicians and has a true name. Each of them is different and each of them applies in slightly different circumstances.

"It’s the same in programming. A variable is an instantiation of a class, like integers, and it has its own name that uniquely identifies it, like a true name. At any given time it also has a value, which is what it actually is just then, but which can change with circumstances. Finally, it can also be known by other names in other circumstances and it can be referred to by a pointer, the way ’Moira’ points to you without using your true name. See?"

Moira stood open-mouthed. "You mean that’s what Wiz was trying to show me?" she asked incredulously. "That’s all there is to it?"

Karl shrugged. "Pretty much."

"But that’s so simple. Why didn’t he just say that?"

"Probably because he never thought of it that way. From what everyone says Wiz was a master class hacker and hackers just don’t think in those terms." He grinned. "We have a saying about people like your Wiz. Ask them what time it is and they’ll tell you how to build a clock." Jerry put the scroll back on the pile.

"Now I’d like to ask you something. What did you mean just now when you said you don’t think the way we do?"

"We do not generalize the way your people do."

"Who says so?"

"Why, Wiz."

"I think Wiz is wrong. You don’t generalize the way Wiz does, but then most people don’t. You’re oriented to language, not mathematics. One of the things that confuses it is you’re very careful in your speech. You don’t use metaphors and similes in the way we do, probably because your language can directly affect the world around you. You can make magic by accident."

Moira thought hard.

"Then you think we can learn this new magic?"

"I’m sure of it. Oh, you’ll probably struggle like an English major in a calculus class, but you can get it if you’re willing to work at it."

"How is it you are so much more skilled at explaining all this?" Moira asked.

"Oh, that. I was a high school teacher for a while."

"A teacher? Then why did you become—whatever you are?"

Karl grinned ruefully. "Kind of a long story. Seems I started out to be an engineer and in my junior year I decided I’d rather be a teacher. So I switched majors and got my degree in education."

He looked out the window and sighed. "Well, after I had taught math for a couple of years, our high school got an inspection by the accreditation commission. I had more than enough math courses to teach math, but most of them were taken as engineering courses. So the accreditation commission decided they didn’t count. I could either go back to college and take twenty-four hours of math courses I’d already had or I wouldn’t be certified to teach math and that would count against the school’s rating."

"You mean you were not a good teacher?" Moira asked.

"Oh no. I was a very good teacher. The accreditation commission rated my classroom performance ’superior’. But I had taken all my math courses with an ENG prefix instead of a MA prefix."

The hedge witch frowned. "Forgive me, My Lord, but I do not understand."

Karl sighed. "Neither did I. That’s why I took a job as a software engineer—for twice as much money."

Moira thought hard for a moment.

"My Lord would you be willing to take on an additional duty? Would you be willing to teach this to others?"

Karl’s mouth quirked. "In my copious spare time?"

"It would do much to ease the suspicion and mistrust."

Karl thought about it for a moment. "I guess I can spare an hour or so a day."

"Thank you, My Lord. In the meantime, you can expect a formal visit from representatives of the Council sometime very soon."

"Ducky," Karl said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. "Just what we need. A project review."

Eighteen: Playing in the Bullpen

"We’ve got a good team," Jerry told the wizards as they walked toward the converted cow barn, now known universally as the Bullpen.

The late afternoon sun slanted golden across the court and the air smelled of warm flagstones and dust, with just a tinge of manure to remind them of the Bullpen’s original purpose.

Jerry kept up a flow of half-defensive small talk, Bal-Simba was soothing and the other two, Malus and Petronus, were distinctly cold.

"Have you had trouble adapting?" Bal-Simba asked.

"Some. It turns out that there’s a strong psychological component here. What a piece of code—a spell—does is constrained by its structure, but its manifestation, the demon it creates, is strongly influenced by the outlook and attitude of the programmer." He sighed. "It’s tough, but we’re making good progress."

"We have confidence in you, of course," the giant black magician told him. "But the Council has a responsibility to oversee any use of magic in the North."

"And to see that magic is used wisely and safely," Malus said pointedly.

"Naturally we’re glad to have you, but there probably won’t be much to see," Jerry told him. I hope, he added to himself.

Bal-Simba nodded amicably. Actually the visit was about as casual as a surprise inspection by a team of Defense Department auditors, but part of the game was to pretend otherwise.

"There have been certain questions about your performance," Bal-Simba said as they approached the door. "I fear you have not made the best possible impression."

"With all due respect, Lord, we didn’t choose our programmers to make a good impression. You need a difficult job done on a very tight schedule and we got the best people we could. I’m sorry that we aren’t more presentable, but the most talented people are often a little eccentric."

Bal-Simba nodded, thinking of some of the peculiarities of his fellow wizards.

"Some say your people are as flighty as the Little Folk," Petronus said as they reached the door to the barn.

"That’s because they don’t know them," Jerry said, reaching out to open the small door set in the larger one. "People who do what we do tend to be very concentrated on their work. They may seem a little strange to anyone on the outside, but their main goal is always to get the job done. We’ve got a good team here and they’re a pretty serious bunch."

He motioned Bal-Simba and the others ahead of him. The black giant ducked his head and stepped over the sill.

They stood together at the threshold to let their eyes adjust to the dim light. The barn still smelled of hay, grain and cattle, a dusty odor that tickled the back of the nose but not unpleasantly.

"Welcome to the…" Jerry’s head jerked back as something zoomed past his nose, climbing almost straight up.

It was a Mirage jet fighter no bigger than his thumb. As it topped out of its climb it fired two toothpick-sized missiles toward the ceiling. There above them a half-dozen tiny airplanes were mixing it up in an aerial melee. One of the Mirage’s missiles caught a miniature Mig-21 and blew its tail away. A tiny ejection seat popped out of the plane as it spiraled helplessly toward the flagstone floor and an equally tiny parachute blossomed carrying the pilot down to safety.

Jerry and the wizards gaped.

A two-inch-long F-16 peeled off from the dogfight and dove at Jerry’s head.

"Now cut that out!" Jerry roared. The fighters vanished with soft pops and there was a snickering from one corner of the Bullpen.

Bal-Simba stared off at the wall and carefully avoided saying anything.

"Ah, yes," Jerry said. "Well, ah, this is where we work."

The central aisle of the barn was taken up by a plank-and-sawhorse table piled high with books, scrolls, blank sheets of parchment, inkpots, quills and wooden tablets marked and unmarked. At the far end of the barn the whitewashed wall was streaked and smudged from being used as an impromptu whiteboard. Next to the wall sat a waist-high brazier warming an enormous pot of blackmoss tea.

The stalls were on either side of the aisles and each stall held a littered trestle table and a chair. Most of them also held at least one programmer.

"All these ones are working on one great spell?" the giant magician asked dubiously.

"Yes, Lord. We divide the work so each of us has a specific part. Our first week here was spent doing systems analysis and producing a design document so we’d all know what we were doing."

Jerry gestured at the long table. "This is our central library. We keep the project documentation and specs here where we can all consult them."

Petronus reached out to examine a large book on top of the pile. Just as his fingers touched it, the pile shifted and hissed at him. He yanked his hand back as a scaly head on a long neck rose out of the mass and slitted yellow eyes transfixed him. Sinuously a small dragon flowed out of its lair among the books. It was bigger than the beast which had guarded Wiz’s original book, perhaps two feet long. Its scales were the same vivid red, but they were tinged with blue along the edges. It eyed Bal-Simba with suspicious disapproval.

"Another demon?" the wizard asked.

"No, that’s a real dragon. Wandered in here one day and decided it liked it."

"Hunts mice real good," Danny volunteered.

Petronus sniffed and the group moved on. The dragon whuffed suspiciously, decided these people bore watching, and trailed after them, eyeing the hem of Petronus’s robe speculatively.

Jerry scanned the cubicles desperately for someone to show off. Cindy Naismith’s feminist manner was likely to offend them, Larry Fox hadn’t had a bath since they arrived and Danny was too big a risk to even consider. Finally he saw Karl was in his cubicle and steered the group, dragon and all, in there.

"This is Karl Dershowitz, one of our programmers. Karl, you know Bal-Simba and these are, ah, Malus and Petronius."

"Petronus," the wizard corrected, stonefaced.

"Ah, yes. Petronus. Anyway, they’re here observing today and I wanted to show them what you were doing."

Bal-Simba pushed into the stall until he stood directly behind Karl. "What have you there?" he asked.

"I’m working on a sequencing module," Karl told them, slightly awed by Bal-Simba’s bulk and pointed teeth. "This is the part that reports conflicts between the different processors."

"And this is the—ah—sequencer?" Bal-Simba gestured at what sat on the desk.

"No, this is a debugging tool. Each of these demons monitors one of the versions of the code and reports any destructive interactions."

Sitting on Karl’s desk were three monkeys. One had his paws clasped tightly over its ears, another had its eyes clinched shut and the third was covering its mouth. "Hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil," Karl said. "That means everything’s running fine."

"There’s something familiar about those three," Jerry said. "Something in their faces."

Karl looked sheepish. "Well, yeah. That kinda just happened."

The monkey demon in the middle suddenly opened his eyes and glared at the one to his left. He reached out and poked his fingers in the other’s eyes. The demon recoiled and then grabbed his tormentor by the nose, twisting it sideways and leading him around the desk. The third monkey broke up laughing at the sight and the first two turned on him.

"Okay," Karl said, "we’ve got a conflict here. One of the processors jumped the queue and grabbed a resource intended for another one. When they got locked in contention the third processor got more than his share of resources."

He looked down at the orgy of eye-poking, nose-twisting and noggin-bopping going on on his desk.

"Now I recognize them," Jerry said.

"Uh huh," Karl said. "I’ve got the sound turned off. Otherwise it gets kinda noisy in here."

They watched the byplay between the monkey demons for a while longer.

"I know I’m going to regret asking this," Jerry said at last, "but what’s the name of that module?"

"That’s the Scheduling Transport Operating-system Object Generator and Editing System."

Jerry’s lips moved as he worked out the acronym. Then closed his eyes. "I knew I was going to be sorry I asked."

The group backed out of the stall and moved down to the end of the aisle. Several benches had been arranged about the section used as a whiteboard. Jerry gestured for them to sit.

The dragon had decided Jerry and Bal-Simba were all right. He crowded close to Jerry’s legs and bumped his head insistently on his calf. Absently, Jerry reached down and scratched him on the scales behind his pointed ears.

"Have some tea?"

Bal-Simba’s nose wrinkled. I thank you, no." The others also shook their heads and the wizards started to sit down.

The dragon sighed luxuriously and pressed harder against Jerry’s legs, forcing him to shift his stance or be knocked off balance. Jerry sat down on the bench harder than he intended, causing the other end to jump up and smack Petronus on the bottom as he sat down. The wizard glared, Jerry reddened and the dragon wuffed insistently, demanding more scratching.

"I want to apologize. Things aren’t usually this lively."

"I should hope not," Petronus said.

"Quite a display," Malus said. "Attacked by a swarm of miniature demons as soon as we entered."

"Oh, they weren’t attacking us," Jerry assured him. "They were playing a game. The idea is to shoot down your opponent’s fighter."

"Your opponent’s fighter?" asked Bal-Simba. "You mean those demons were not self-motivated?"

"Oh no. What would be the fun of that? The idea is to outfly the other guy."

"So each of those—fighters?—was directly controlled by a magician."

"Sure. At least most of them are. A few were probably drones thrown in to improve the dogfight simulation, but…"

"Dogs?" asked Malus. "You call those dogs?"

"Well, no, but it’s called a dogfight you see, and…"

"If the creatures who are fighting are not dogs, why call it a dogfight?" The pudgy wizard waggled his finger at Jerry. "Confusion. That’s what this new magic of yours does, it sows confusion everywhere."

"No, you see…" But he was interrupted before he could get any further.

"Fox," a female voice proclaimed from the other end of the Bull Pen, "that’s disgusting!"

Cindy Naismith came striding down the aisle, eyes blazing, with Larry Fox trailing behind her.

"Jerry, I want you to do something about this right now!"

"Cindy, can’t you see we’re having a meeting?"

"Now!" Cindy demanded.

Jerry turned to the wizards. "Ah, excuse me, Lords." Then he faced Cindy and Larry. "Let’s go talk, shall we?" and he herded them down to the opposite end of the Bull Pen.

"What the hell is this all about?" Jerry hissed as soon as they were safely away from the inspection party.

"It’s about the so-called user interface this cretin wrote for the front end."

"The code’s in spec," Larry said sullenly.

"Spec my ass!" Cindy blazed. "That routine is pornographic and demeaning to women!"

"Pornographic code?" Jerry asked, totally bewildered.

"Here," Cindy said. "See for yourself!" She turned and gestured to call up the demon. There was a small billow of pinkish smoke above the central table. It writhed and coalesced into solid flesh. Very solid and very pink.

Jerry gaped. "Holy shit!"

The demon was gorgeous, voluptuous and totally nude. A mass of blue-black hair spilled down over her shoulders, her blue eyes were alight with amusement and promise. She smiled at her watchers and ran a pink tongue tip over her blood-red lips in a way that was blatant invitation. Then she stretched and reclined on the table in a way that made her enormous breasts ride even higher on her ribcage and her dark nipples stick out like strawberries.

In the small part of his mind that was not totally occupied by the vision stretched out on the table, Jerry realized that all three wizards could see what was going on. In fact Malus was standing on the bench and craning his neck to get a better view.

"It gets worse," Cindy said. "You should see the things she does!"

"Yeah," breathed Jerry. "I mean, no. Of course not!" The demon shifted her shoulders and pointed her delicate toes at him, still smiling.

"Well, it’s supposed to be user-friendly," Larry said in an aggrieved tone. "Hey, I offered to do a male version. Tom Selleck or something. But noooo, she wants to spoil everyone’s fun."

"If that’s your idea of fun…"

The demon smiled again and scissored her legs in a way that showed off her dark pubic patch.

"That’s enough!" Jerry said sharply, tearing his eyes away from the demon.

"Look," Jerry mumbled, examining his shoelaces, "this module is supposed to help the user, not distract him. Do some work on that interface, all right?"

As Jerry walked away he heard Danny whisper urgently. "Hey Larry, give me that code, will you?"

"Sorry about the interruption," Jerry said as he came back to the wizards. "Now, let me show you what you came to see."

"I think we have seen enough of this—this circus!" Petronus said.

"Quite enough," Bal-Simba agreed amicably. "My Lord, could you create a demon so obedient to your commands as the ones we saw when we first came in?"

Petronus froze. "I would not demean myself…"

"But if you wished to, could you?" he shook his head. "I could not, I know. Have you ever seen a demon so instantly responsive?"

"No," Petronus finally admitted. "No, I have not."

Bal-Simba turned to Jerry. "And how long did it take to create that swarm of demons?"

"Hey Danny," Jerry called out, "how long did it take you to write that air combat game?"

Danny stuck his head around the corner of his cubicle. "Jeez, Jerry, you always assume…"

"How long, Danny?" Jerry said inexorably.

The young programmer shrugged. "Oh, maybe four hours."

"You see," Bal-Simba said to his fellow wizards. "In less time than it takes us to frame a moderately complex spell, this young one created a dozen demons whose subtlety we cannot match. This shows the worth of the effort, I think."

Petronus snorted. "Trinkets. A handful of magical trinkets."

Bal-Simba shifted his bulk and the bench teetered alarmingly. "You would rather they write their spells large for practice? Or released them outside the confines of this building? No, I think their wisdom in making trinkets is manifest."

"Well," said Malus, looking longingly down the table toward the spot where the "user interface" had been, "they are certainly accomplishing something."

"It is obvious they are accomplishing a great deal," Bal-Simba said. "I think their work should continue unhindered."

Petronus looked from Bal-Simba to Malus. "Oh very well," he said at last. "I only hope we do not regret this afternoon’s work." He rose and bowed to his colleagues. "My Lords, if you will forgive me, my own work presses." He turned and stalked the length of the Bull Pen without a backward glance.

"I too must be gone," said Malus. "Unless you have another demonstration?" he asked hopefully.

"No," Jerry said firmly. "Thank you for coming, Lord." Malus bowed and followed his colleague out.

"Thanks, Lord," Jerry said to Bal-Simba as the dumpy wizard pulled the door shut behind him.

"Petronus is firm in resolution, but not subtle in debate," Bal-Simba said, smiling to show off his filed teeth. "He gave me an opportunity and I took it." Then he sobered. "Besides, I was afraid of what might happen if we stayed within a moment longer."

"You and me both, Lord," Jerry agreed fervently.

Bal-Simba rose and Jerry rose with him. "I admit I had some misgivings, but it did not go badly, I think."

"I had a few misgivings myself. Uh, we really are making progress. I can show you if you want."

Bal-Simba chuckled. "Oh, I believe you, Lord. And no, it is not necessary to show me. I trust you and I doubt I would understand half of it."

Jerry followed the huge wizard to the door lost in thought.

"You look as if you have something pressing upon your mind," Bal-Simba said as he held the door for him.

"Well, yes Lord," Jerry said as they stepped out into the courtyard. He sighed. "Look, I know this is a new environment and it’s a completely different culture and all, and I know that even the laws of nature are different here." He stopped and for an instant looked as if he might cry. "But Lord, this place gets weirder every day!"

Bal-Simba nodded and looked back at the Bull Pen. "My thought precisely," he said in a bemused tone.

Wiz eased his way down the corridor, hugging the wall and keeping a tight grip on his rusty halberd head. Somewhere off in the distance he could hear the faint drip, drip, drip of water. Dripping water meant running water and running water was likely to be cleaner than the foul musty slop he had found so far. So in spite of his misgivings, Wiz pressed on. It was so cold his breath hung in puffs before him. Short, sharp puffs because Wiz was panting from fear.

The corridor was utterly still and completely empty. Save for the soft dripping and the even softer pad of his own feet there was no sound at all. When he stopped the quiet pressed in around him like a smothering cloak.

Most of the lanterns in the stretch still worked, albeit dimly, holding the dark at bay and leaving the shadows as patches in the corners, to writhe threateningly each time the lamps flickered.

At first Wiz thought the patch ahead of him was another shadow. But it did not shift or vanish as he approached. In the dim light he was almost on top of it before he realized what it was.

In the center of the corridor lay a bloody heap of dark robes wrapped about a thing which might have been a wizard. The head had been smashed like a melon and there was a smear of blood and yellowish brains on the wall beside the corpse. The arms and legs stuck out at impossible angles and the torso was bent backwards as if it had been broken like a dry stick over a giant knee.

Wiz gasped and shrank back against the wall. There were killers aplenty in the ruins, he knew, but nothing he had seen or heard that had the power to take a wizard—or the sheer ferocity to do this.

Then Wiz looked more closely. There was steam rising from the sundered torso, steam from the shattered skull as the corpse gave up its body heat to the surrounding cold. There were even faint wisps of steam coming from the pools of blood surrounding the remains. The wizard had been dead for only minutes. Whatever had done this had to be nearby.

Wiz turned and ran, all thoughts of fresh water forgotten.

Nineteen: Half-Fast Standard Time

"Good morning," Karl said as he walked into his makeshift classroom.

The faces of his pupils showed they didn’t think there was anything good about it. Their expressions ranged from grim determination to equally grim disapproval. He didn’t know what methods Moira and Bal-Simba had used to round up the dozen or so blue-robed wizards who were sitting at the rows of tables in front of him, but he had heard hints of everything from cajolery to blackmail.

Well, Karl thought as he turned back to the blackboard. At least I don’t have to worry about this bunch throwing spitballs. He turned around to face the grim-looking men and women in their magician’s robes. Lightning bolts maybe, but no spitballs.

"Okay," he said. "Let’s go back and review some basics."

"You sent for me, Lord?" Jerry Andrews asked as he knocked on the door of Bal-Simba’s study.

The black wizard looked up. "I did. Please come in and close the door."

Uh-oh, one of those meetings! Jerry thought as he complied.

"I wanted to find out if there was any way you can speed up your project," Bal-Simba said as soon as Jerry sat down.

"Lord, as I told you at our first meeting, this will take time. We have accomplished an amazing amount, largely because you have been willing to let us alone to get on with it. We’re way ahead of any reasonable schedule on this project, but we’re still only about forty percent done. It just takes time, Lord."

"I know," Bal-Simba said. "But there have been some, ah, changes since our first meeting. You know that we face the possibility of war with the elves and others?"

Jerry nodded.

"What I tell you now is not common knowledge and I would keep it so. In the past three days we have lost two northern villages."

Jerry’s eyes widened. "You mean they were invaded?"

Bal-Simba smiled mirthlessly. "I mean we lost them. They are not there any more. Where they stood is virgin forest once again."

"That’s scary."

"Perhaps more frightening than you know. Our watchers and other magicians had not the slightest hint that anything was amiss. There was not the least quiver, not a sign that magic was at work."

"That’s real scary."

"That is also why I wish to keep it quiet for the time being. But you see why we must have your new magic, and have it soon.

"If we had this we could use it as evidence to help us bargain. Or as a weapon should the bargaining fail. In either event, we must have it quickly."

Jerry thought hard. Pressure to complete a project early was nothing new and he had been in a few situations where the fate of the company depended on it. But this was the first time being late with a project meant war.

"How fast do you need it?"

"We need it today," Bal-Simba said. "But the need will be critical in a moon or less."

"We’ll try," he said finally. "We’ll try like hell, but there’s no way we can have a working project in that amount of time."

"I understand," Bal-Simba said heavily. "Be assured that if it comes to open war we will return you and the others to your World before matters come to a head."

"Thanks," Jerry said uncomfortably. "Lord, you do understand that we’re working as fast as we can? There’s just not much more we can do."

"I do understand that and I thank you for your efforts. Meanwhile, is there anything we can do to make your job easier?"

Jerry made a wry face. "I don’t suppose you could come up with a forty-eight-hour day, could you?"

"Would that help?" Bal-Simba asked.

Jerry froze. "You mean you can come up with a forty-eight-hour day?"

"No," the huge wizard said sadly. "Only a spell makes a night stretch to twice its normal length. The great wizard Oblius created it for his wedding night. It did not help him for he discovered that his reach exceeded his grasp—so to speak." He shrugged. "I do not think it would aid us for you to sleep twice as long.

"Or would it?" he asked as he caught the look on Jerry’s face.

"Do you mean," Jerry said carefully, "that you have a spell that makes time pass half as fast?"

"We do," Bal-Simba said, "but it does not mean that time actually slows down. The people inside think so, but to outsiders they seem to speed up. Besides, it only works from sunset to sunrise."

Jerry whooped and pounded Bal-Simba on the back. "Fire up that spell! We just may be able to beat this sucker yet."

"People do not work at night," Bal-Simba protested.

"You’re not dealing with people," Jerry told him. "These are programmers, boy. Programmers!"

Seklos announced his presence to his master by sniffling and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his robe. He had been showing Dzhir Kar progressively less respect as the hunt for the Sparrow dragged on interminably. Besides, his cold had gotten worse.

"We have lost another one," Seklos said without preamble.

Dzhir Kar raised his head. "Where? How?" he demanded.

"In the south tunnels. Isk-Nor. Killed like the others."

Dzhir Kar nodded. So far half a dozen of the Dark League’s wizards had disappeared in the City of Night. Two of the bodies had been found, torn to pieces. Privately Dzhir Kar suspected that most or all of the others had deserted.

"I gave instructions that none were to hunt alone."

"He was not hunting. He was returning from a trip to a warehouse when he became separated from his companion."

"You mean he was out looting and found more than he bargained for," Dzhir Kar said sharply. "I warned you all that it is dangerous to go poking about. The City of Night is no longer ours."

Seklos sniffed and wiped his reddened nose on the sleeve of his robe. "And I warned you we must be done with your notion and sport and use magic to find him quickly."

"No! No detection spells. I forbid it."

"This is absurd! If you wish the Sparrow dead, then let us find him and kill him. "But this constant chasing about wastes our time and disperses our energies."

"Do you question my authority?" Dzhir Kar said dangerously.

"No master, only your judgment."

Dzhir Kar glared at his second in command. Under Toth-Set-Ra it would have been unthinkable for one of the Dark League, even the second, to use such language to the leader. But Toth-Set-Ra was dead. Dzhir Kar did not have his predecessor’s power.

"I will consider what you say," he said at last.

"Consider this also. There are those who grow restive. The deaths and disappearances of their fellows upset them. All are cold and hungry and many wonder if the prize is worth the effort. Today they grumble quietly. But soon they will do more than that. We must either find the Sparrow or call this off and do one or the other quickly."

Dzhir Kar nodded and waved dismissal. The wizard bowed and, still sniffling, backed from the room.

After Seklos left, Dzhir Kar sat for a long time with his head bowed and his hood pulled up around his face. His lieutenant was right, the deaths and disappearances had made the other wizards nervous. If something was not done, he would have a mutiny on his hands—probably led by Seklos.

His position was anything but secure and he and Seklos both knew it. Unlike Toth-Set-Ra, who had a powerful slaying demon at his beck, or the councils which had ruled the Dark League by playing off the shifting factions, Dzhir Kar ruled by the force of his personality alone. As long as he led the Dark League to success, or at least kept it out of major trouble, he would remain in power. But this business had occupied far too many of his wizards far too long in something both boring and dangerous. If that did not change quickly, the Dark League would have a new leader.

He had promised the Dark League that this would be a simple task. Use the turncoat northern wizard to lure out the Sparrow, rely on the homing demon to neutralize the Sparrow’s alien magic and then kill him quickly. On the strength of the League’s hatred for the Sparrow and the demonstration of his demon, the League wizards had agreed to his plan.

He raised his head and looked over to where his creation sprawled, eyes slitted and tendrils quivering as it sought a trace of the Sparrow’s magic. Dzhir Kar frowned. He hadn’t told them the whole truth about his demon. A wizard never did, of course, for knowledge was power. But in this case he had concealed a crucial fact and now that concealment was coming back to haunt him.

It was not a desire for sport that kept him from using detection spells, it was necessity. Detection spells would interfere with the demon’s senses. If anyone tried to use a detection spell to find the Sparrow, the demon would not be able to sense his magic in time to stop him from casting a spell. The League knew all too well what the Sparrow’s magic was like if he were free to employ it.

Dzhir Kar’s head dropped back on his chest and his claw hand tightened on the arm of his chair. Close. So very close to success and now time was running out.

"Two no-trump."

Karl, Nancy, Mike and Larry Fox were sitting at the table in the Wizard’s Day Room, all hunched over their cards.

"I thought you’d given up on cards," Jerry said as he came over to them.

"We did, but we figured out a way to make it work," Nancy told him.

"Yeah. It turns out that in this universe a shuffled deck of cards is in something like a Schroediger-indeterminate state," Mike explained. "The cards don’t have a value until you—ah—’collapse the state vector’ by revealing them."

"Which means you can’t play a game if no one has seen the order of the cards," Nancy said. "Even Canfield solitaire, you go through the whole pack the first time."

"Anyway, the key to playing is to collapse the state vector after the cards are shuffled and before they’re dealt."

"But if you have to look at the cards what’s the point of playing?"

"Oh, the players don’t have to know the values," Karl said. "It’s enough if someone or something else does. So," he gestured at the head of the table, "meet Moe the Dealer."

Sitting there was a small demon wearing a green eyeshade, a violently patterned vest and garters to hold his shirtsleeves up. His skin was a particularly pale and unhealthy shade of green and a large cigar stuck out of the corner of his mouth.

"So youse gonna bid or youse gonna talk?" Moe demanded in a raspy voice.

"He looks at the cards after he shuffles and before he deals," Larry explained.

"Come on, come on, play cards," Moe said.

Jerry shook his head. "Amazing. Well, finish your game. Starting tonight we go on overtime."

Dark purple shadows were already creeping across the landscape when Danny climbed through the trap door and out onto the roof. June was already there, looking out over the World.

"I guess you heard there’s a war brewing," he said without preamble as he sat down next to her. June nodded without taking her eyes off the horizon.

"They’ve got to have the project even faster, so they’ve worked out something special," he said eagerly. "They’re going to use magic to stretch the nights in the Bull Pen so we can get more work done."

June gasped and turned to him, her face chalk white. "No!"

"Hey, take it easy, it’s not that big a thing."

June grabbed Danny’s hand and held it tight in both of hers.

"Do not go! If you go you will never come out again."

"Hey now…" Danny said, but June started to cry silently.

He put his arm about her and patted her shoulder. "Look, it will be all right, I promise. It’s only for a night."

"A night in such a place lasts an eon," June said. "I will be dead and dust ere you return."

"No you won’t," Danny said and reached forward to pat her shoulder.

June released her hand and locked her arms about him fiercely. She pressed her lips to his and her tongue was like a living thing in his mouth.

Wordlessly she drew him down onto the roof slates, fumbling with his shirt as they went.

Half numb and half exhilarated, Danny followed where she led.

The moon peeking over the gabled roof caught the two naked bodies stretched on the slates. Danny rolled over on his side and admired the play of moonlight and shadow on the curve of June’s hip.

"You’re really something, you know that?" He ran his hand up over her hip and pressed her small breast, feeling her nipple harden in the center of his palm. June smiled contentedly and turned toward him, lifting her mouth up for a kiss,.

Danny kissed her long and gently. Then he broke away with a sigh and reached behind him for his clothes.

"You know I’m gonna get in a lot of trouble for this."

June didn’t say anything; she just looked at him.

Danny got to his knees and picked up his pants. "I gotta see if I can get in."

June grasped his wrist hard. "You will not go."

Danny fidgeted. "I’ve got to," he said. "Look, this is important. For everybody, okay? They need me. I’ve got to go, okay?"

This time June seemed to accept it. She dropped her hands to her side and nodded dumbly.

He pulled his shirt over his head. "I’m gonna have to apologize all over the place, tell ’em how sorry I am." He stopped talking while he tucked his shirt into his pants. Then he leaned over and kissed her. "But I’m not sorry."

June smiled but her gaze was troubled.

Danny was in a daze as he made his way down the stairs and out into the courtyard. He wasn’t sure what, but something had changed up there on that rooftop and somehow he knew the world would never be the same.

He approached the Bull Pen cautiously. It didn’t look any different tonight than it had on any other night. The whitewashed sides shone silver in the moonlight and warm yellow light leaked out of the cracks around the door. But as he got closer he felt a tingling on his skin and the hairs on his arms and legs rose.

The feeling got stronger as he got closer. When he reached for the door there was a resistance like moving his hand through water. The latch was hard to work and the door was very hard to open. When he stepped through something pressed against his face and he couldn’t breathe. Then he was through the door and everything was normal again.

"Where the hell have you been?" Jerry demanded as Danny came in.

"Just out."

He looked at him suspiciously.

"You were out screwing around, weren’t you?"

Danny just grinned.

"Dammit, we’re here to do a job, not get laid by the locals. If you can’t keep your mind on what you’re doing, then you don’t belong here. Is that clear?"

Around them the other programmers were bent to their work, studiously ignoring Jerry and Danny.

"Yes, sir." Danny said meekly.

"I don’t care what you do between sunrise and sunset or who you do it with. Men, women or underage goats, it doesn’t matter. But between sunset and sunrise your ass belongs to me and you’ll have it in here working. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then get the hell over there and get it to work."

Danny’s ears burned, but somehow the dressing down didn’t sting as much. For perhaps the first time in his life, Danny knew that somebody really cared what happened to him.

As Danny took his seat Jerry shook his head and muttered under his breath before turning back to the routine he had been analyzing with Cindy Naismith.

"Are you sure that little punk’s nineteen?" she asked. "He acts more like thirteen."

"He has a California driver’s license that says he’s nineteen." He looked at her. "He been bothering you?"

"No, nothing like that. At least not me any more than everyone else. But what the hell is he doing here?"

"Moira wanted him. Not my idea. Wouldn’t be the first time the customer stuck a dud on a project team."

"Yeah, but usually they’re the project manager’s girlfriend or something."

"His work’s not bad."

"No," Cindy admitted. "He likes to hack an easy out and he hates doing grunt work, but he’s bright and he seems to take to this kind of programming."

"Let’s just hope his love life lets him get some work done," Jerry grumbled. "We’ve just doubled our number of programmer hours and we still can’t afford to waste any of them."

The sun was just breaking over the distant mountains when the spell quit and the world jerked back to normal for the team. Most of them took it as a signal to stretch, yawn and head for bed. Mike and Larry stayed at their desks, deep in their work even after so many hours. Judith left with the rest, but she wasn’t ready for bed yet. Every day at dawn dragon riders left the Capital on patrol. This was the perfect opportunity to see the dragons.

The aeries were in the cliff beneath the castle. Judith was nearly trembling with excitement as she made her way down the long flights of stairs cut into the rock. All her life she had dreamed about dragons, unicorns and other magical creatures and now she could see them close up. Maybe she could even get one of the dragon riders to take her for a ride. A handsome dragon rider.

In her mind’s eye she was already soaring over the castle on dragon back when she reached the portal into the aerie. The two guardsmen on duty recognized her as one of the foreign wizards, which meant she was of the Mighty, after a fashion, and thus allowed to go nearly anywhere. It never occurred to them that she did not know what she was doing when she nodded to them and strode out onto the floor of the aerie.

The aerie was clangor, noise and barely organized confusion. Dragons were being harnessed, armed and carefully guided to their places. Swarms of men and women worked around them, grooming them, tending them and carefully moving the ones ready to fly to their assigned places.

The dragons themselves were fit and eager. They pranced and tried to flex their wings in anticipation. It took careful work by their handlers and a lot of attention from their riders to keep them calm.

As Judith watched, another dragon came up to the mark, spread its huge leathery wings and charged straight at the rectangle of sunlight that was the gate to the outside. It plunged through the portal, disappeared from sight for an instant below the sill and then rose into view again, wings beating as it climbed to join its fellows circling above.

Judith was so enchanted she didn’t see the dragon being brought up behind her until she stepped right in front of it.

The dragon snorted explosively, jerked its head back and lashed its tail in surprise. The whipping tail missed another dragon by inches and slammed into a food cart, knocking it over and spilling chunks of beef and cow intestines everywhere.

The second dragon saw the food laid out before it and lunged for the meat in spite of the efforts of its crew. The first smelled the meat and turned, drawing a warning roar from the other dragon. The first one roared back a challenge and both beasts tried to rear and spread their wings in threat.

What had been organized confusion dissolved into chaos, with dragon roars reverberating from one end of the aerie to the other and men running everywhere trying frantically to get the animals under control.

The Master of Dragons, a gray-haired man with the light, compact build of a dragon rider and an empty sleeve from the accident that had ended his riding days came charging down from his platform.

"You fornicating moron," he yelled at Judith over the roars of the dragons and the shouts of the men, "Get the fornicating shit off the floor!"

While the crews fought to control the dragons, rough hands grabbed Judith and hustled her out the door.

She stumbled through the portal and stood white and shaking under the disapproving eye of the guards for a moment. Then she burst into tears and dashed up the stairs.

With the coming of the programming team Moira had blossomed. The programmers were ignorant of the ways of this World and they had no time to learn. From her association with Wiz, Moira was better equipped to deal with them than anyone else in the Citadel—even if she frequently didn’t understand them. So Moira became ’liaison, staff support and den mother’ with her own box on the table of organization charcoaled on the wall of Bullpen.

For the first time since she had come to the Capital, Moira had a job that kept her busy and fulfilled. Most of the time it also kept her mind off Wiz.

She did not go into the Bullpen at night, but her days were filled with obtaining materials the team needed, making sure there was sufficient ink and parchment available, and now with the new spell seeing that food would be ready for them when they emerged at dawn. She also served as go-between to smooth matters between the team and the Mighty and the Citadel’s people.

Thus she was the one the Master of Dragons cornered later that morning and berated because one of those execrable new wizards had the fornicating stupidity to blunder out into the execrable aerie just as the execrable morning patrols were taking off. This execrable woman nearly caused a dragon fight, disrupted operations and delayed launching half the patrols by nearly a day-tenth. If these execrable aliens couldn’t stay in their places he would go to the execrable Council and get an execrable spell to put a fornicating wall of fire across the fornicating door to the fornicating aerie.

"Begging My Lady’s pardon, of course," the man said when he paused for breath.

Moira agreed with him, soothed him, promised him it would never happen again and sent him away still grumbling but more or less content.

After he left, she sat in the tiny room at the keep she used for an office and scowled at the wall. From the Master’s description she recognized that the offender was Judith, but what in the World had she been doing in the aerie? Everyone knew dragons were difficult, chancy creatures whose handling had to be left to experts. Even if someone didn’t know that, it was obvious that a fire-breathing monster with an eighty-foot wingspan was not something to be approached as casually as a pony. These people from Wiz’s world might be strange and more than a touch fey, but they were intelligent and they did not appear suicidal.

Well, speculation gets me nothing, she thought, rising from her desk. The thing to do is find Judith and have a talk with her.

That and give orders to the guardsmen that the team is not to be allowed free run of the castle, she added as she went out the door.

It took Moira the better part of an hour to find the miscreant. She was standing on the parapet looking so utterly miserable that Moira’s carefully prepared scolding died in her throat.

"My Lady, are you all right?"

"Oh, hello Moira," Judith sniffed. "No, I’m fine."

"Forgive me, but you seem upset."

Judith smiled wanly. "I was just thinking that you should be very careful what you wish for because you may get it."

"My Lady?"

Judith turned toward her and Moira could see she had been crying.

"You heard what happened this morning? When I went to see the dragons?"

"That was not wise, My lady. Dragons are dangerous."

"Yeah. Dangerous, nasty-tempered, foul-smelling beasts." She took a sobbing breath. "Up close they’re not even pretty."

"I am sorry if they frightened you, My Lady."

"No, they didn’t exactly frighten me." She smiled through her tears. "I probably scared the dragons worse than they scared me. I guess I’m really mourning the death of my dreams."

She sniffed again and smiled with one corner of her mouth. "Funny isn’t it? I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve still got dreams. Or I did until I came here. I believe in romance. Not so much the boy-girl kind as, well—romance."

"Romance?" Moira asked, puzzled.

"Yeah. Castles, dragons, knights in shining armor. All that stuff. And then one day they all come true. And you know what? They’re all about as romantic as a Cupertino car wash."

Moira thought about it for a minute.

"Why should it be otherwise? People are people in your World or mine. As best I can see they all have the same wants and needs."

"Yeah, but it was supposed to be different! Does that make any sense?" Judith asked miserably.

"In a way," Moira said. "I am not what you call a romantic person, but I think I understand somewhat.

"You know they tell the story of Wiz and I throughout the North." A quick smile. "We are heroes, you see. Figures of romance.

"But what we did was not terribly heroic and it wasn’t at all romantic. Mostly I was very frightened and cold. Wiz was too angry that I had been stolen to be heroic. We both did the best we could and by fortune it worked out well."

"So what you’re saying is there is no romance in the world, in any world?"

"No, but I think there is another element, one that comes between the doing and the hearing. That is what turns something frightening or wearying or utterly miserable into a romance. I think that element is in the mind of the teller."

She paused and looked out over the battlements to the fleecy clouds. "I think you confuse what is outside with what is within you. The dragons, or the freeways, those are the external things. It is not the deeds or the things that make a romance, it is what you do with them inside yourself.

"My lady, do you remember the day you arrived, when the dragon cavalry swept over the keep? You made us see them in a way we had never seen them before. I think that is the real secret of romance. Not places or people, but the ability to look at the World and see the romance that is there."

Judith quirked one side of her face up into a smile. "You may be right. I sure don’t seem to be having much luck finding that quality outside of me."

"But you have it inside, Lady. That is better than not having it at all."

"I guess you’re right," Judith said, fumbling a well-used handkerchief from her gown’s sleeve. "Thanks."

"You are mor than welcome, My lady. Just stay out of the aeries, please."

As the days dragged on Wiz came to know his pursuers well enough that they developed distinct personalities. There was the fat one who hated to exercise and who searched perfunctorily and never a place that was hard to reach or might be dangerous. There was the one who was addicted to laying in ambush, but whose fondness for onions and persistent flatulence gave him away. There was the lean one with the long arms who seemed to delight in rooftops and other high places.

And then there was Seklos. Seklos of the keen nose, who never seemed to rest and who searched relentlessly, who poked into every nook and cranny and who checked everything.

This couldn’t go on. He would slip sooner or later. So far only more luck than any mortal deserved had kept him alive and free. But that couldn’t last.

Meanwhile, the longer this murderous game of hide-and-seek went on, the more likely it was that there would be a war. It wasn’t just his life that was on the line here—although that is a major consideration, he thought, it was the fate of the entire World.

Well, if he couldn’t run forever and he had to survive, there was only one thing to do. He didn’t want to fight the Dark League, but they would not rest until he was dead. He had no way out so he had to fight them to the death.

Yeah, but whose death? He shook the thought off and began to consider methods of fighting back.

This place was odd, Wiz thought. It was a tower in the shadow of what had obviously been a major palace. But the tower was squat and ill-proportioned with doorways big enough to drive a truck through.

The peculiar proportions were emphasized by the fact that the top was missing, blasted away during his attack on the city. But it was sound up to the fourth level, which was where Wiz was standing now.

The room was large and roughly circular, with a single large French door that led out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the street below. It gave a wonderful view of the city, but aside from that seemed useless.

So did the contents of the room. It had either been stripped or hadn’t had anything in it to begin with. Just a few stone benches around the walls and some miscellaneous trash on the floor.

He was about to leave when he heard voices outside. Someone was coming up the street below and it could only be wizards of the Dark League.

Normally Wiz would have run away, but his new resolve made him step out on the balcony to check out the situation.

The situation could not have been better. Laying on the balcony were several large blocks of stone which must have fallen when the top of the tower went. Coming up the narrow street were two wizards of the Dark League and one of them was Seklos!

Wiz picked up one of the blocks of stone and rested it on the carved stone railing. Then he watched the wizards get closer and closer and smiled.

"… dragging me all the way up here," the other wizard said as they came closer. Wiz recognized him as the cautious one.

"Because this is where he must be," Seklos said. "Fool, do you not see that the quicker we catch this most troublesome bird, the sooner we can leave this place?"

Wiz put both hands on the block and held his breath.

"But why me?" the other wizard asked.

He never got his answer. At that moment they came under the balcony and Wiz shoved the rock over the edge.

Wiz watched with a sinking heart as the stone smashed into the pavement and shattered a good arm’s length behind his intended victim. He scuttled back from the edge dislodging a shower of pebbles in the process.

Seklos’ companion gaped at the shattered rock on the pavement behind them. "Dangerous place." He looked up at the tower nervously. "The stones are loose."

Seklos looked up at the parapet. "I do not believe in such accidents." He turned to his companion. "Go, spread the word that this area is to be cordoned off and searched most carefully. I think we may be near our Sparrow."

As he pounded down the stairs, Wiz realized he had made a serious mistake. There was only one door to the tower and that was just around the corner from where the wizards had been standing. If he didn’t get out the door before Seklos came looking for him…

Too late! He was still nearly a flight from the bottom when Seklos came through the door and into the tower. As quietly as he could, Wiz backed up the stairs.

Seklos came on, staff in hand, ready to strike at the slightest sound or movement. Wiz moved back up the spiraling stairs ahead of him. There was no time to open a door and no room to squeeze past his pursuer. The only place he could go was back into the room where he had thrown the rock.

That’ll still work, he thought, fighting down the panic rising inside him. He can’t see me and as soon as he comes into the room I’ll be able to slip around him and get down the stairs. Moving as quietly as he could, he eased through the door and made for the far end, next to the window.

Seklos strode into the room and sniffed the air. His head swung this way and that like a hunting dog tracing a scent. Wiz stood stock still, afraid to breathe. Two more steps and he would be far enough in that he could get behind him and out the door.

Seklos took a single cautious step into the room and scanned from side to side. The wizard stopped short. "What…" Then his face split in an evil smile.

"A cloak of invisibility? Clever Sparrow. Oh, very clever indeed. But did they not tell you never to stand in a sunbeam wearing a tarncape?" He raised his hand and flicked his wrist in the direction of the window. Wiz had a glimpse of something silvery flying through the air. Instinctively he dove and rolled.

Behind him the stone wall exploded into flame. Wiz hugged the floor and squinted his eyes shut to block out the heat.

Dust! Wiz thought frantically. The dust gave me away! Seklos must have seen his outline in the sunlit dust motes. He raised his head and saw Seklos blocking the doorway, his staff extended in front of him. Behind him a wall of luminous blue blocked the doorway.

In desperation, Wiz hefted the halberd. He knew he couldn’t get in under the staff with the shorter weapon, so he threw it at the wizard, sidearm so it spun horizontally.

As soon as it left Wiz’s hands the halberd became visible. Seklos dodged it easily, swaying to one side like a snake. His face lit with unholy glee as he watched it sail past him.

"So you confirm your presence. Thank you, Sparrow. And now you cannot hide. Your cloak cannot save you." The wizard extended his staff and waved it from side to side like a blind man while he fumbled in his sleeve.

On tiptoe Wiz backed away from the questing staff. No good to try to get around him. Frantically he looked for someplace to hide.

The only possible place was under one of the benches. Wiz squeezed beneath the nearest one, face to the wall in a vain attempt to muffle his breathing. He clinched his eyes tight and waited to feel the lethal staff tip in the center of his back.

"Come out, little Sparrow," the hateful, hate-filled voice crooned. "Come out and face your end."

There was a hideous roar followed by a ringing scream cut short in mid-cry. Then there was a thrashing and horrible crunching noise. Wiz forced himself further back into the crevice.

Then all was silence. No sound from Seklos, no sound of anything else. As quietly as he could Wiz twisted around and looked out.

At first he thought it had suddenly turned to night. All he saw from beneath the bench was blackness. And then the blackness moved. The enormous black body hopped ponderously to one side, the huge head turned. Wiz went weak from sheer terror.

The thing looked at Wiz with burning red eyes and then turned away. It lumbered through the last dying vestiges of the blue fire and out the door. Wiz heard it make its way down the corridor.

It took a long time for Wiz to get his heart back under control. The monster had destroyed the wizard and it looked right at him, but it hadn’t touched him. The way the thing looked at him Wiz knew it had to have seen him. But it hadn’t made a move to harm him. Somehow Wiz did not think it was because the monster was a friend.

Wiz had never seen the huge black creature, but he recognized it from descriptions. It was Bale-Zur, the slaying demon which had brought Toth-Set-Ra to power in the Dark League and then destroyed him when Wiz attacked the City of Night.

There was something about that. Something he had learned. He cudgeled his brains, trying to recall that almost-remembered bit of knowledge. Something he saw? No, something someone told him. Before he used his new magic to travel to the City of Night and rescue Moira. Something someone told him about demons, or dragons, or…

Of course! True names. Humans weren’t the only creatures with true names. Fully mature dragons had them. And so did some kinds of demons because it was only by knowing their true names that they could be controlled. That was how Bale-Zur found his prey. Unlike other demons, the great slaying demon did not need to know a thing’s true name to destroy it. All it needed was for the being’s true name to have been spoken somewhere in the World at some time.

And of all mortals in the world, William Irving Zumwalt was the only one safe from Bale-Zur. No one had ever spoken his full name—his true name—anywhere in this World.

Licking his lips, he stepped over the gruesome remains of the wizard. As he did so he kicked something that rolled across the floor.

Wiz was almost afraid to look down for fear his foot had touched some body part. But it was only a silvery sphere about the size of a baseball that had been clutched in what was left of Seklos’ hand.

Seklos must have grabbed it when Bale-Zur attacked him, Wiz thought. Overcoming his revulsion, he bent down and picked up the sphere. He couldn’t be sure but it looked like the thing that the wizard had thrown at him, the one that spread fire on the stones.

He forced himself to look at what was left of Seklos and realized his left sleeve was lumpy. Swallowing his gorge, Wiz reached into the blood-sodden sleeve and fished out two more of the spheres. He could have done it faster except he kept his eyes closed through the whole process.

The three spheres gave him weapons, his first real weapons that might be effective against the wizards of the Dark League.

The wizards… ! Seklos had sent his companion for help. Wiz stuffed the balls into his pouch, grabbed his halberd and dashed down the stairs. There were three wizards not more than a hundred yards up the street when he emerged from the building. Without hesitating, Wiz ran around the corner, leaving the black robes to wonder at the sound of footsteps with no sign of the runner.

Several blocks away, Wiz sank back against the wall of an empty storeroom and listened for any sound of pursuit.

The situation got worse and worse. His cloak of invisibility’s spell had some loopholes. Wiz had no doubt at all that there were counter-spells that would render it useless.

Wiz forced himself to calm down and think. Through all the hunger and cold and terror, he had to think.

He had to summon help somehow and if he expected to live long enough for that he had to defeat or neutralize the Dark League. Two problems and both of them looked insoluble.

But maybe—just maybe—one problem could solve another again.

He needed magic to get out of here. If not magic to walk the Wizard’s Way, then a burst of magic to attract the Watchers who stood guard over the whole of the World.

But it didn’t have to be a burst of his magic.

Wiz looked at the three spheres in his lap and a plan began to form in his mind.

Dzhir Kar rested his pink scarred forehead in his one good hand and ground his teeth in frustration.

The Sparrow had slipped through his grasp again. They had been within a hairsbreadth of him this time, he knew it. Yet that damnable little bird had fluttered through his clutches once more.

And now Seklos was gone. Seklos the tireless, the indefatigable. Seklos who hated this Sparrow almost as much as he did. Torn apart by something in the upper city while the entire contingent of the Dark League came running to his rescue.

That hadn’t been lost on the rest of his band. They had seen what had happened to Seklos and the sight had done nothing for their ardor in the search. Now most of them wanted to leave the City of Night and abandon the search. Only his overwhelming skill at magic and the loss of the natural leader of any opposition to him kept them here.

Still his demon lay coiled in an alcove of the chamber. Occasionally it would raise its head and the tendrils along its fanged mouth would quiver as the Sparrow considered using magic, but so far there was no magic from this most alien of wizards, nothing the demon could home in on.

It was enough, Dzhir Kar thought, to make a wizard cry.

Twenty: Forcing a Fight

Wiz tiptoed down the corridor, convinced that the sound of his heart must be giving him away at every beat. Over and over he repeated to himself the route out of this maze.

It was unfamiliar ground to him. This was the one part of the City of Night he had been striving to avoid ever since he was kidnapped. This was the path to the lair of the Dark League.

There were no guards and no sign of magic protecting this place, which only made Wiz more nervous.

Finally he turned a corner and saw a brightly lighted doorway not thirty feet ahead. There were two black robes standing in front of it talking. Through the open door he could see others moving around.

Wiz stepped back around the corner and for the first time in weeks, removed his cloak of invisibility. Taking one of Seklos’s fire globes in his hand he turned the corner again and, before the wizards could react, threw the ball straight at them.

His aim with the ball was no better than his aim with the rock. About two-thirds of the way down the corridor the ball broke against the wall and a sheet of flame erupted between him and the wizards. A lightning bolt lanced through the flames and struck near him. Wiz turned and ran with the shouts of the wizards ringing in his ear.

The tricky part is going to be making sure that everyone arrives when they are supposed to, he thought as he dodged down the corridor. Another bolt of lightning crashed into the stone behind Wiz, knocking off chips and tainting the air with the tang of ozone.

That and staying alive. Wiz ran faster and threw the tarncape around his shoulders.

"What was that?" Dzhir Kar roared, rising from his desk. From his place in an alcove off the workroom, Pryddian cringed back.

One of the wizards burst into the room, hair and beard singed and smoking holes in his robe. "Dread Master, the Sparrow has attacked us?"

"Then after him. After him! Everyone!" Dzhir Kar was hopping up and down in fury. "Catch him and bring him to me."

The wizards piled out of the workroom in a rush. Dzhir Kar paused long enough to look over at his demon, still coiled with its eyes closed. He grasped his staff with his good hand and hobbled after his wizards.

"Dread Master?" Pryddian spoke tentatively.

Dzhir Kar gestured and a wall of heatless blue fire sprang into being across the door to Pryddian’s alcove. The apprentice cringed back away from the deadly flame.

"Stay there until we return," he croaked and hobbled out.

It turned out to be nearly as hard to keep the hunt going as it had been to avoid it entirely. By alternately showing and concealing himself, Wiz was able to keep his pursuers after him. Once or twice he almost had to shout at them to bring them back on the track. At first he worried about being too obvious. Then he saw that the wizards were so eager to catch him that nothing could make them pause to consider his motives.

He had to wait for several minutes outside the gate near the strange tower before he was spotted by a wizard. Then three of them came around the corner at once and let fly at him with a flurry of lightning bolts as he dodged through.

"This way, Dread Master, this way," the wizards chorused a few moments later when Dzhir Kar came up, using his staff as a crutch.

"He did not go beyond this place," another assured him. "We came from all point of the compass."

Dzhir Kar peered through the gate at the courtyard beyond. The square was windowless with walls perhaps four times the height of a man. A single door gaped on the opposite side of them from the gateway.

"Trapped!" Dzhir Kar crowed. "There is no way out of that building. We have him now. Spread out, brothers. Spread out fingertip to fingertip and we will hunt down our Sparrow." He picked up a handful of windblown dust from the marble paving and threw it into the air before him.

"Use the dust. It will show his form."

The wizards quickly formed a ragged line. Two paces apart they advanced across the court, tossing dust into the air as they went.

Lying on his belly on the roof of the building Wiz watched them come. It had taken him the better part of the night to chop and pry a hole in the roof so he would have this vantage point and escape route. Now all he could do was watch and wait—and be ready to run if his plan went awry.

The line of wizards was half-way across the square when the shadows in the building began to move. As one man they stopped, forewarned by their magical senses. The line wavered as some of them stepped back, away from the darkened doorway where something was clearly stirring. Wiz held his breath.

And into the square came the demon Bale-Zur.

Normal mortals would have fled. But wizards need courage beyond ordinary men and women. Besides, they knew it would be futile to run.

A score of wizards threw back their sleeves and raised their staffs almost in unison. Suddenly it was Hell out for the Fourth of July in the square.

Magics flashed and roared across the square. Spells crackled through the air to bounce off the demon like many-hued lightnings. Balls of green and purple and blinding white fire flew this way and that across the square.

None of it mattered. Bale-Zur did not even flinch as he came across the marble flagging with a hopping, toad-like gait. A wizard screamed as the creature reached out with great rending claws.

Crippled as he was, Dzhir Kar could not run. He stood his ground to the end, flinging spells at the demon until the clawed hand reached down and scooped him up to the rending, blood-stained jaws.

The last few wizards tried to run, but it made no difference. In spite of his clumsy gait Bale-Zur was far faster than any human. Their screams mingled with the demon’s roars as he crushed the life out of them. Wiz clapped his hands to his ears and turned away from the scene in the court below him.

Then all was silent. There were no more cries, no more roars, no more crash and flash of magic. Suddenly the only sound was the icy wind playing over the stonework and making weird little whistling noises as it stirred the dust below.

Once again the warty head swiveled and again Wiz stared into eyes as red as the fires of Hell. Then the eyes slid over him and the huge toadlike demon turned away. Soundlessly it half-dragged, half-hopped out of the square, heedless of the black-robed bodies it crushed beneath its great clawed feet.

"Odd," the Watcher said, staring back into her crystal.

"What?" the wizard asked.

"There in the City of Night, a sudden flare of magic."

"Is it the Sparrow?" the other asked eagerly.

"No, it is not the new magic." She shrugged. "Perhaps just a remnant of the Dark League’s power."

The other nodded. The Watchers were used to strange things happening in the ruined city. As long as they were not too powerful they were nothing to worry about or to be passed up the chain of command.

Still, the Mighty were frantic to find Wiz and this was an unusual occurrence. The shift commander looked up. "What have we got near the City of Night?"

"No assets in place right now," the patrol commander called back from the other side of the pit. "There is a squadron of dragon cavalry that could swing further south and be there in two day-tenths."

"Then send them south," the shift commander told her. "Have them search over the City of Night carefully." The patrol commander nodded and turned back to her crystal.

"Should we also inform Bal-Simba, Lord?" asked the deputy commander.

"No. No point in that. This may be nothing after all."

With the flash and pulse of repeated magics still ringing in his ears, Wiz made his way to the large open space in the center of the city.

The forces unleashed as the wizards fought for their lives against Bale-Zur would provide a beacon, a magical flare big enough to be seen by the Watchers back at the Capital. Now all he had to do was mark his chosen vantage point and scan the skies for the dragon patrols which were sure to come south to investigate the magical maelstrom he had touched off. There was food and water in his pack for several days, and two more of the fire globes to make a final signal to guide the rescuers in. He had even taken the precaution of gathering up several long pieces of white fabric to use as marker panels. They would stand out vividly against the dark sand.

Carefully he laid down the white cloth taken from the chests in the shape of a large X. He anchored the pieces with handfuls of the fine black volcanic sand that floored the square. That done, he stood up, stretched and leaned over backwards to ease his aching back muscles.

Wiz looked up, squinting into the pale sun. The walls ran straight up and smooth for perhaps thirty feet. Above that they moved out in a series of steps. Like ranks of bleachers.

Like ranks of bleacher seats . . . Wiz looked around with a new comprehension. The black sand beneath his feet, the unclimbable walls, the seats above suddenly all made sense. An arena. He was standing in an arena. The central tower must have something to do with the events held here.

Wiz shuddered. Knowing what the Dark League had been he didn’t want to think about what those events must have been like.

Well, that’s over and done with, he told himself. Arena or not, it’s still the best place in the city to watch for help.

He looked over the tower speculatively. It was a squat oval with slanting sides perhaps four stories tall. The top was mostly flat with a large square block, man high, in the middle. In use the tower would have been as impossible to scale as the arena walls, but the earthquakes that had accompanied his attack on the City of Night had caused one section of the tower to collapse, leaving a crude stairway of large stone blocks up to the top.

Wiz hefted his pack, picked up his halberd and started across the sands to the tower.

There was a scuffling sound from the far end of the arena. Wiz turned and saw several lean wolf-like shapes almost as dark as the sand emerge from one of the doors.

With a sinking feeling, Wiz realized he wasn’t out of the woods yet.

Now what in the World did those sods back at the Capital want? The Dragon Leader thought.

He and his patrol had been on the wing for nearly twelve hours already. Men and dragons alike were tired and even with heating spells they were chilled beyond numbness. The flight would have to stop to rest the dragons on the way back as it was. If they continued south to pass over the City of Night they might have to set down on the Southern Continent itself. The Dragon Leader didn’t like that at all. The Dark League might be gone, but there were still things on that continent he did not wish to meet on the ground with half a dozen exhausted men and dragons.

Still, orders were orders. He rose in his saddle against the restraining straps and signaled his men to turn their patrol line south toward the ruined city.

One quick pass, he promised himself. One quick pass and then it’s north and home!

A weird warbling howl broke the windy stillness of the ruined city.

Dire Beasts!

Wiz had only seen the wolflike creatures once before, by moonlight on the night he and Moira had been chased through the forest by the forces of the Dark League. He had had only a glimpse then and the sight had left him with nightmares for months. Now he counted a half dozen of the great wolflike creatures slinking out into the open space.

Frantically Wiz scrambled up the broken stone on the side of the tower. The blocks were six and seven feet high and sometimes he had to stand on tiptoe or jump to reach the next one. Once his fingers slipped off the smooth surface and he landed painfully on the block he had just left. Another time he jumped back as a block teetered dangerously when he grasped it.

He reached the top panting and gasping. Then he rolled over flat on his belly and peered down into the arena. The dire Beasts had congregated below, looking up the way Wiz had come. One or two of them broke off from the pack and slunk around the base of the tower, as if looking for another way up.

He half-formed a spell in his mind, but he felt the familiar dread quivering and knew that the demon had survived its creators.

Now the ones that had split came racing back. The entire pack put their noses together and whined and growled at each other, looking up occasionally toward Wiz. Finally the huddle broke and very tentatively one of the Dire Beasts began to climb.

The things were much better climbers than wolves were, but not as good as a man. Only the one collapsed section of the tower gave access to the platform where Wiz lay.

Wiz put his pack aside and picked up his halberd. He was armed and his enemies had to climb up a steep grade to reach him one at a time. Somehow Wiz doubted that was enough to make it a fair fight.

The dark coastline ahead looked about half as attractive as Hell with the fires out.

Not all the fires on the southern continent were out. The volcano that towered above the City of Night was trailing a thin smear of dirty smoke from its top. Rising along its flank, the City of Night was a disordered jumble.

Dragon Leader made his decision. They would come in fast, swooping from altitude to gain speed. One single fast pass over the ruined city and they would be away for an island in the Freshened Sea where they could rest for a few hours. Signaling his men to spread out in a patrol line, Dragon Leader urged his weary mount to climb higher in preparation for the sweep.

"Got something here," the rider on the far left of the patrol line reported. Dragon Leader pressed his mount’s flank with his knees to bring him around to check.

As soon as he glided over the courtyard he saw what had attracted the rider’s attention.

Scattered around were several dark-robed bodies, some crushed and dismembered. The walls and paving of the court were streaked and discolored from the aftereffects of powerful spells. One section of the wall had melted and run like candle wax under the magical impact.

Looks like they dueled among themselves, Dragon leader thought. That explains the magic the Watchers sensed. He looked down at the crumpled dark forms and shrugged mentally. Whatever it was, it doesn’t involve us. He spoke into his communications crystal. "Echelon right and climb for altitude. We need to reach the island before dark."

Now there were four Dire Beasts climbing the broken rock toward him. Wiz bit his lip and watched them come. He fished into his pouch and pulled out one of the fire globes. Animals were supposed to be afraid of fire. Perhaps this would frighten them off.

Lying flat on the stones, Wiz tossed the fire globe over the side. There was a satisfying "whoosh" and leap of flames. After a second, he stuck his head over the edge to see the effect.

He nearly lost his nose for his pains. Not only hadn’t the fire daunted the beast, the first one was almost to the top. Powerful jaws with two sets of fangs snapped shut so close Wiz could smell the stench of the thing’s breath. He jerked his head back and rolled away. Then he realized he had to keep the thing off the platform at all costs.

Too late. The wolf thing had gained the platform with all four feet. Hackles up and back fur stiffened into a mane, the Dire Beast advanced on him. Wiz fumbled in his pouch and came up with the second fire ball.

The globe flew straight and true to shatter at the beast’s feet. Instantly the animal was engulfed in an inferno. With a howl of agony, it threw itself from the stone platform. It made a blazing fireball all the way to the blackened sand. It struck with a "thump" and lay still.

For a moment the Dire Beasts hung back. Then one of them howled and they charged up the crumbling stone again.

In the back of his mind, Wiz realized he had just thrown away his last hope of signaling should help arrive.

Dragon Leader had just crossed the beach out over the Freshened Sea when his wingman broke in on the communications frequency.

"Smoke behind us."

Dragon Leader twisted in his saddle. A thin black curl of smoke was rising in the distance, back over the city.

He hesitated. Should they turn south again to check it out? It was probably an accidental fire or a new volcanic vent. Their orders had been to search for magic. Certainly it was not magic, he told himself. Therefore it was none of his business.

The welfare of his troop was his business and that demanded he get them to a safe resting place as soon as possible. The other members of the flight craned their necks to see and he could feel them waiting for orders.

"Not our pigeon," Dragon Leader said finally into the communications crystal. "Hold your course." The rest of the troop relaxed. He felt his wingman start to say something and he braced for a challenge to the order, but the challenge never came.

They had flown north for three more wing beats when he sensed a change in the formation. He looked back and saw his wingman sliding in.

The formation had opened out, as it always did on long patrols. Now the wingman was closing in to the precise Number Two position, tucked in tight to his leader’s right, exactly as he had been taught in riding school. In spite of the long hours they had been in the air, the younger man was sitting bolt upright in his saddle and he was ostentatiously checking his weapons and equipment in exactly the manner prescribed when leaving a combat zone.

Every maneuver, every patrol, you will perform as if it were the real thing!… by the checklist, mister!

He felt his subordinate’s eyes boring into him and he knew every other man in the flight was watching as well. Dragon Leader had seen nearly thirty winters and suddenly he felt all of them.

"Shit!" he muttered to himself. But he sat up straighter and tightened the straps holding him to the saddle. Then he pressed his knees into his weary mount’s side and with a wave of his arm turned his squadron south again over the City of Night.

Wiz thrust desperately at the snarling face just a few inches below him. The creature snaked its head to the side to avoid the thrust and snapped at the halberd head. Claws scrabbled against rough stone as the Dire Beast got first one foot and then another up on the stone ledge. Wiz chopped down at a leg, but the animal yanked it back and the blade struck sparks from the basalt. The head lunged forward and the jaws snapped like a pistol shot. Wiz was forced to give ground as the creature got all four feet on the stone. Behind the first, Wiz could see the head of a second Dire Beast climbing the same path.

Unbidden, Donal’s words came back to him. Put your back to the wall and die like a man.

Halberd in both hands, Wiz edged away from the snarling monster, back towards the wall. Hackles up, the creature advanced slowly across the rock.

Wiz bumped into the wall and nearly stumbled. He pressed his back against the cold, rough stone and raised the broken halberd. The two Dire Beasts split up and circled to either side of him. Wiz took a deep, gasping breath and squinted into the pale sun, trying to keep track of both creatures at once.

A shadow fell over his face. Above him he heard the sound of wings. Dragon wings.

What in the… ?

Dragon leader scanned the scene below. Down in the arena there were about a half dozen wolves or something attacking what looked like a lone man.

There was even a checklist for cases like this. It called for two dragons to drop low to investigate while the others stayed overhead flying a complex figure eight pattern. Dragon riders knew from bitter experience that there were things beyond the borders of men which were masters of illusion and used that power to lure men and dragons to their deaths.

Dragon Leader watched as the speck on the ground retreated before the two larger, darker specks that split up to come at him from either side. The checklist called for him to spread his formation out while the two scouts descended in broad circles, looking for signs of an ambush. Already the two dragon riders on the rear of the formation were drifting out and getting ready to spiral down on his command.

The tiny figure moved back against the central pylon and raised a weapon of some sort above its head. The attackers were now on either side of him, ready for the final killing lunge.

Bugger the checklist! Dragon Leader winged his mount over and signaled the rest of the squadron to follow. In a compact mass a dozen dragons hurtled down on the arena.

The Dire Beasts were so intent on their prey they had no warning. The first they knew of the dragons overhead was when a fusillade of missiles tore into their pack.

Suddenly two of the beasts were down with iron arrows in them. One of them bit weakly at the bolt that skewered through its flank and the other one was already still. Three more arrows vibrated in the sand where they had missed their targets.

The dragons swept low into the arena, their wingtips almost brushing the dark sand and the wind of their passage, raising clouds of sand behind them as their riders pulled them into steep turns.

The Dire Beasts on the rock hesitated, torn between the nearness of their prey and the threat from the air. Finally a gout of dragon fire decided for them and they broke away, leaping down the crumbled stone and sprinting across the arena pursued by arrows and bursts of fire.

One of the dragons settled onto the ledge behind Wiz. As the animal folded its wings, the rider swung off and walked stiffly to where he stood.

The man was dirty, disheveled and his eyes were rimmed red from fatigue and hours of squinting into the wind. Still he was the loveliest sight Wiz had ever seen.

"Lord, we have been scouring the World for you!"

"Just get me out of here," Wiz said weakly.