The Wiz Biz (41 page)
Authors: Rick Cook
Even deathtraps need regular maintenance. This one had not been touched since the City of Night fell and it might have been damaged by the earthquakes touched off by the attack. That, and an instinct to keep his feet together, saved Wiz.
Wiz shook his head and climbed slowly to his feet. He was bruised, stunned and his ankles ached from the shock of landing, but he was alive and basically unhurt. He looked up and saw a strip of daylight disappearing as the trap door swung slowly closed with a creaking of unoiled hinges. The door didn’t close all the way and by the dim light coining though the remaining crack, Wiz took stock of his surroundings.
On either side of the pit was a contrivance of rotting wood and rusty iron spikes as long as his arm. Wiz wasn’t at all sure what it was supposed to do and he didn’t want to think about it too closely. Whatever it was, it wasn’t working and that had saved him.
Still, his position was precarious enough. The trap was shaped like a bottle, narrow above where the trap door was and wider down at the bottom. Even if the pit had not been twenty feet deep, it would have been impossible to climb back out.
Wiz looked around. He didn’t think he was going to get out of this without help and right now he didn’t have the faintest idea where he could find help.
###
“. . . so you see, My Lord,” Moira said, “Wiz needs help.”
They had taken a booth in the back while they waited for their pizza and Moira filled Jerry in on his cubicle-mate’s adventures and current plight.
Jerry considered. The more he considered, the less likely the whole thing became. There was no way that Wiz Zumwalt could ever have landed someone like the redheaded dish sitting across from him. The rest of her story didn’t sound too plausible either.
Still . . . when a beautiful woman drops into your lap out of thin air, the event demands some explanation. Hers was no more outrageous than any other theory Jerry could come up with.
“Okay, I believe you,” Jerry said. “But it’s not going to be as simple as you think.”
“Pizza’s ready,” Mario called from the counter.
“Excuse me, I’ll get them.”
Moira fidgeted until he returned with the two steaming pizzas and paraphernalia. He set them down and shook a dash of red pepper flakes onto his.
“Want some?”
Moira looked at the shaker and liberally lashed her pizza with them.
“Careful, those are hot.”
The hedge witch frowned and shook some flakes into her palm and popped a hefty pinch into her mouth.
“So they are,” she agreed and added some more to her pizza.
Jerry sighed and took a bite of his own pizza. A couple of slices of pepperoni fell off the heaped toppings and onto the table.
“What is that?” Moira asked, pointing and wrinkling her nose.
“That’s pepperoni,” Jerry said. “Here,” he picked a slice off his pizza, “taste it.”
The hedge witch drew away. “Thank you, no. It smells spoiled. I do not mean to be discourteous, My Lord, but I do not see how you can eat that.”
Jerry eyed Moira’s anchovy, onion, garlic and feta cheese pizza and said nothing.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, Jerry devouring about half his pie and Moira finishing her first shoe.
“My Lord,” Moira asked finally, “would you be willing to help us?”
“Oh sure. My deal with ZetaSoft is about through. But it isn’t that simple.”
He took another enormous bite of pizza and dribbled sausage crumbs and a piece of mushroom back onto his plate.
“If what you say is true, you’re going to need a lot more than me,” Jerry said around the mouthful of pizza. “You’re talking about taking a one-man program and turning it into full production software, with documentation, a bullet-proof user interface and probably a suite of programmers’ tools as well.”
Moira regarded him seriously but uncomprehending.
“Now, I presume there’s some sort of deadline on this thing?”
“We need it as quickly as possible.”
“Okay, that’s do-able, but not with just one more programmer. We’ve got to have more people. We need a full team.”
Moira helped herself to another slice of pizza. “Can we get them?”
Jerry considered. “There are some problems. For one thing it will be expensive.”
Moira set down her slice of pizza. From the folds of her skirt, she produced a leather pouch. She opened the drawstring and tipped it up. A ringing cascade of golden coins rained out between the hot pepper flakes, grated parmesan and napkin dispenser. One or two of them rang tinnily against the pizza pans.
Behind the counter, Mario continued with his baking, oblivious to the fortune that had just been poured onto one of his Formica tabletops.
Jerry stared and licked his lips, tasting pizza grease. Conservatively this red-haired space cadet had just put about $25,000 on the table—literally.
“Will that be enough?” Moira asked innocently. “I can get more, but it would mean another Summoning.”
“Lady, for that kind of money we could buy a couple of software startups, programmers and all!” Jerry said fervently. Then he stopped and frowned. “But that’s only half of it. We’ll have to recruit them and that’s not going to be easy. You need the people fast, right?”
Moira nodded.
“You also need them good. They’re going to have to pick up on a new language and a whole new operating environment and charge right into work. This is not gonna be a job for BASIC bozos or COBOL drones.”
Moira nodded vigorously. She didn’t know what BASIC or COBOL were, except that Wiz said they caused brain damage in those who used them.
“Now there’s another thing. This has to be done secretly, correct?”
“We have no objection to telling those of your world how you aided us. Bal-Simba and the Council would not be so mean as to deny them credit.”
“The Council?”
“The Council of the North. The wizards who oversee our land. They would gladly provide testimonial.”
Jerry thought about what a letter of recommendation from a council of wizards would look like in his resume file.
“Totally secret,” he said firmly. “And we need to find the people in a hurry.”
“Is there some guild hall or chantry where we might go to find people?”
Jerry considered while he polished off another slice.
“Well, the headhunters are out, that’s for sure.”
“I should hope so! We need these people alive.”
“That’s not what I meant—although with the kind of candidates headhunters turn up it can be hard to tell if they are alive.”
“You make sport of me.”
“A little, maybe. But it’s going to complicate things.” He reached for the last slice of pizza on his plate.
“So what we need,” he summed up, “are people who are good enough to do the job, who are available and who can be made to believe you.”
And,
he added silently,
who are crazy enough to come along on something this dangerous.
“That’s not a common combination.”
Jerry’s eyes fell on one of the handbills tacked to the bulletin board. Even from this distance he could see the picture of the man in full armor and the woman in a long dress.
“I think,” he said slowly, “I know just the place.”
###
Jerry took Moira home with him for the night. “There are no motels close by and I live near enough to walk,” he explained as they trudged the deserted streets.
Moira simply nodded, unconcerned by the proprieties.
She was yawning behind her hand by the time they reached his apartment. He offered her his bed but she would not hear of it. So he settled her on the couch in his cluttered living room with a blanket and pillow.
“Tomorrow we’ll get an early start,” he told her. “The place is about an hour and a half from here and it may take us all day to find the people we need.”
“Good night, My Lord,” Moira said, drawing the blanket over her.
Jerry left her and headed into the bedroom.
If she’s not here in the morning, I’m not going to believe any of this,
he vowed to himself.
Thirteen: Recruiting Drive
If you eat a live toad first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen all day long.
—California saying
To you or the toad.
—Niven’s restatement of California saying
Well, most of the time anyway . . .
—programmers’ caveat to Niven’s restatement of California saying
Wiz spent a cold, miserable night in the freezing pit. With the dawn his prospects didn’t look any brighter. If he didn’t get out of here he was going to die of hunger and thirst. Actually, he’d probably die of the cold before he could die of hunger or thirst.
Face it,
he told himself as he looked around for the hundredth time,
the only way this could get worse would be for the sorcerers to find you.
Up above there was a scraping, as if something was clawing at the cover of the pit. With a groaning of hinges the cover moved aside and a shaft of sunlight streamed down into the depths.
Wiz looked up and saw a huge scaled head peering down at him. The dragon cocked its head to one side and ran its forked pink tongue over its ivory fangs.
Okay,
Wiz thought,
so I was wrong.
The dragon was a late adolescent, not yet grown to the point of acquiring true intelligence, but not far short of it. It was obviously one of the mounts for the Dark League’s dragon cavalry, gone feral. That meant the animal had all the ferocity native to dragonkind and not the least fear of man.
Again the forked tongue licked out, tasting the air in the pit. Then its lips curled back revealing even more of ripping fangs and the animal growled.
Wiz shrank back against the wall as the dragon inhaled deeply. Instinctively he crouched and turned his back even though he knew it wouldn’t help him.
With a
whoosh,
the dragon blasted a gout of flame down into the hole. It was the shape of the trap that saved him. The dragon aimed his fire at Wiz, but Wiz was back out of sight under the overhang. That meant the full force of the dragon fire struck the rock walls of the neck.
The rock was wet, soaked from the eternal damp and the dragon’s fire converted a good portion of the moisture into steam. The overhang protected Wiz, but the dragon got a burst of live steam square in the face.
Dragons are not immune to dragon fire, and still less to steam. The beast snapped its head back and roared a high whistling scream like a tea kettle gone berserk. It jerked back from the pit, whipped around and galloped off, roaring and screaming at the top of its lungs.
Son of a bitch,
Wiz thought as the dragon’s screams faded into the distance. He drew a deep lungful of moist warm air that stank of sulfur and dragon and looked around the pit in wonder.
I’m alive. Son of a bitch!
He was still trapped in the pit and he was still hunted, but he was alive.
Wiz threw back his head and laughed at the wonder of it all.
###
“Rise and shine,” Jerry said as he came out of the bedroom. “We need to get an early start today.”
It was mid-morning, which didn’t strike Moira as particularly early, but she didn’t comment. She watched fascinated as Jerry pulled a couple of packages out of the refrigerator’s freezer compartment and popped them into the microwave oven.
“Breakfast will be ready in a couple of minutes. The bathroom’s over there if you need to freshen up.” Moira nodded and went through the door. Most of the fixtures were strange to her, but fortunately Wiz had told her enough about his world that she was able to figure things out.
“Hope you like country breakfast,” Jerry said. “I wasn’t expecting company and it’s all I’ve got.”
The microwave oven beeped and Jerry removed the boxes. Moira opened hers and poked the contents dubiously with her fork. The eggs were tough, the sausage patty tougher and both had an odd metallic taste besides. The biscuit and gravy were steaming hot on the surface and icy in the interior. If this was the “fast food” Wiz had raved about, there was something seriously wrong with the man’s taste buds.
She looked over at Jerry, who was busy shoveling the contents of his box into his mouth.
Well, I have eaten worse,
she thought. Wordlessly she began eating what was in front of her.
Jerry drank coffee with his meal. Moira, who had wanted to taste this beverage Wiz had talked about, took one sip and stuck with water.
The day was bright but overcast. Except for the odd stink in the air, it was very pleasant.
“It will take us about an hour and a half to get there,” Jerry said as he unlocked the door of his Toyota. “Depending on traffic, of course.”
He held the door open for Moira and then went around and slid behind the wheel. Once in he reached back behind himself and pulled a dark cloth strap diagonally across his body. Then he looked at her.
“Strap in.”
Moira looked at him, puzzled.
“Reach behind you and pull the belt out, bring it across and buckle it over beside the seat. No, you’ve got to pull it out smoothly or it won’t come all the way.”
With much tugging and contortions, Moira got the lap and shoulder belts fastened.
“It’s for your own good,” Jerry told the hedge witch. “It will protect you in case of a crash.”
“A crash,” Moira echoed faintly.
“Yeah, a wreck. Oh, but that almost never happens,” he said, catching sight of her face.
Moira barely had the belt fastened when Jerry started the car and pulled out in traffic. Moira found herself speeding along at an incredible clip bare inches from another car moving in the same direction. She looked up and saw other vehicles charging toward them, only to whiz by close enough to touch.
Moira gulped and turned white. Jerry, nonchalant and oblivious, kept his eyes on the road.
They came to an intersection and Jerry whipped the car through a right angle turn in the face of oncoming traffic. To Moira it appeared they had missed the truck bearing down on them by a hair’s breadth. She stared at the dashboard and tried to ignore the outside world.
There was a tremendous roar in her right ear. Moira jumped at the sound and looted up involuntarily. To her right, barely an arm’s length away sat a man who was going faster than they were. His arms were extended to me front and his beard and long hair were whipped into a wild tangle by the wind. The hedge witch caught a glimpse of the complicated black-and-silver contrivance he was sitting on before he flicked away around another car.
Jerry reached a place where the road narrowed, and climbed gently. Instead of slowing on the hill, he speeded up. Moira moaned softly and concentrated hard on her lap. Her hand grasped the door handle until the freckles stood out stark against the white knuckles.
Jerry glanced over at her. “Don’t pull on that!” he said sharply. “If the door comes open in traffic we could be in real trouble.” Moira jerked her hand off the handle as if it had turned into a snake. She reached forward with both hands to grab the dashboard tightly.
Jerry wasn’t a very good driver, but he had been driving the California freeways for almost twenty years. He speeded up smoothly and edged left to merge into the center lane of traffic.
Out the right window, Moira saw trees and greenery whizzing by so fast they were a blur. She looked left just in time to see Jerry jerk the wheel and slip the car into a space barely longer than the automobile.
They were sandwiched between two semis—roaring, bellowing monsters that threatened to spread Moira and the car between them like butter on a sandwich. She moaned again and closed her eyes.
“It’s not bad today,” Jerry said conversationally. “You should see it when the traffic’s heavy.”
Moira mumbled something and kept her eyes on her lap.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said I hope I never do see that,” Moira said more loudly. But she didn’t lift her eyes.
Jerry looked at her sympathetically. He was a white knuckle flier himself. “Okay. If there’s anything you need, just let me know.”
“My Lord,” Moira said fiercely, “the only thing I need is for this trip to be over as soon as possible.”
###
Wiz ran his hand over the surface of the stone one more time. There had to be a way out of this. After all, the Dark League would need to retrieve anyone captured in the pit, wouldn’t they?
He looked over at the spike-and-wood contraption in the pit.
Then again, maybe not.
It would be perfectly in character for the Dark League to leave a captive to rot in a place like this. Well, he wouldn’t get anywhere brooding on that. He would have to see what he could find.
Wiz put both his palms against the wall and pushed. His left hand met unyielding resistance, but the stone under his right hand seemed to shift. He pushed again. Yes, the stone had moved!
A secret door.
Wiz didn’t know much about dungeons and mantraps, but that fitted perfectly with his conception of them. There must be a passage behind this wall.
He pushed again. The block shifted a little, but nothing else happened. He pushed the stones around it. Some of them also moved but no door opened. He put his fingers on the edge of the block and tugged hard. The stone moved slightly, but that was all.
He dropped his arms. Either he hadn’t found the right stones to push or the door was broken. Either way, it seemed like the best thing to do was force the door rather than rely on the mechanism. For that he needed something to pry with.
He looked at the iron spikes of the trap reflectively. The metal was dark and pitted with rust, but it looked strong. Each spike was about three feet long and perhaps two inches around, crudely forged to a point on one end.
He grabbed the end of a spike and tugged. The spike moved ever so slightly. He dug his heels into the stone floor and wrenched back on the spike with all his strength. The spike moved some more.
Eventually he was able to work the spike free of damp and somewhat rotten wood. It was heavier than he expected and his biceps ached from the pulling, but he ignored that and attacked the loose stone in the wall.
The tool was clumsy and there wasn’t much of a joint around the stone, but Wiz set to with a will, heedless of the noise he made. His technique was crude and it took a long time before he was able to pry the block part way out of the wall. With hands trembling from eagerness and fatigue, he jammed the bar into the joint and heaved one final time. The block clattered out onto the floor and Wiz thrust his hand into the opening.
Behind the stone was nothing but dirt and rock.
With a groan he threw the iron bar across the trap and slumped to the floor. It wasn’t a doorway at all, just a loose stone in the wall. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling. The only way out of here had to be through that hole. That meant he was trapped unless he could climb the overhanging walls or build a ladder.
There was wood in the spiked device, but not nearly enough to reach the surface, even if it were all combined into a single long pole. Stick the spikes into the wall and climb them like a ladder? Not enough spikes. Besides, how would he get past the overhang?”
Magic? With that demon on the loose he’d never live to complete the first spell.
And that was it, some half-rotten wood, a few pieces of iron and a block of stone levered from the wall.
A block of stone? Just one?
Wiz stood up and began to try the wall again. He found another loose stone, and then another and another. Most of the wall seemed to be loose, almost every other block could be pried free.
It was the cold, Wiz realized, the cold and the damp working at the stones. When this place was built the City of Night was kept magically warm. But with the fall of the League the magic had vanished and the stones had been subjected to alternate freezing and thawing. The walls of the trap had not been mortared and the working of the water had shifted the stones. The fact that most of the courtyard was paved in dark stone probably helped warm things up.
He picked up the spike and eyed the wall. This wasn’t as elegant as a hidden passage and it was sure going to take a lot longer, but it would work.
Besides,
he thought as he attacked the first stone,
I don’t have anything better to do.
The real problem was going to be to get out enough of the blocks to do some good without bringing the whole place down on his head, but he had some ideas on that and it would be a while before he really had to worry.
###
Moira did not look up when they turned off the freeway and headed up a poorly paved road. She did not know how long they rocked along before they turned again onto a dirt road and rattled over a cattle crossing. The dust tickled her nose and made her cough, but she still didn’t look up.
“Well, here we are,” Jerry said. “You can look now.” Moira kept staring at the dashboard, as if she intended to memorize every wrinkle and crack in the vinyl.
“Come on, end of the line. Are you all right?”
“I think,” Moira said judiciously, “that Wiz was far braver than I ever knew.”
She tore her eyes away from the dashboard and looked around. They were in a small valley. The brown hills above them were crowned with the gray-green of live oak trees. There was dust everywhere. The stink was still in the air, but not as strong here as in the city.
The field before them was crammed with vehicles standing cheek-by-jowl and all covered with a thin film of dust. A steady stream of people filtered out of the field, stopped at a table by the path and then headed over a low hill. Most of them were weighted down with bags, boxes, bundles and long poles of some light-colored wood.
“What is this place?”
“It’s a war. These people come here to pretend to be living in ancient times. Um, something like your place but with no magic.”
Moira looked around, bemused. “They come here to pretend to be peasants?”
“Well, ah, not exactly.”
“And why would the Mighty of your world wish to pretend there is no magic?”
“Actually,” Jerry explained, “some of them are pretending there is magic.”
Moira opened her mouth to ask another question and then thought better of it. This was remarkably similar to conversations she had sometimes with Wiz.
