The Wiz Biz (43 page)
Authors: Rick Cook
“I will be guided by you in this, Lord,” Moira said. “I know little of such matters. But there is one I would like included. The young one. Thorkil du Libre Dragonwatcher.”
Jerry raised his eyebrows. “That kid? He’s not in the same league with most of the rest of the people and I think he’s a pirate to boot.”
“I thought he said he was a programmer.”
“A pirate is a land of programmer. He steals other people’s software.”
“Nonetheless, I would have him.”
Jerry shrugged. “I think he’s going to be more trouble than he’s worth, but okay. I’ll add him to the list.” He made a note on the pad and looked up. “Why do you want him, anyway?”
“A feeling,” Moira said. “Just a feeling.”
“A premonition?”
Moira smiled. “In this place? No, I just feel that he has something to offer. I do not know, perhaps he reminded me of Wiz.”
Jerry made a face. “Now that you mention it, there is a certain resemblance.” He scribbled another note on the list. “Okay, then. That’s our team.”
“Now what?” Moira asked.
“Now we call them back, explain the terms and give them the contract to sign.” He made another face. “This is where it is going to get
real
interesting.”
###
There was food in the black and white palace after all. Wondering what had been the kitchen, Wiz found half a flat round loaf of bread and several strips of dried meat that had fallen behind a counter.
The meat was probably tough before it had been dried and it was certainly stringy. The bread was heavy, and full of what seemed to be sawdust, but after two days and a night in the pit, Wiz was in no mood to complain. He wolfed down his find and then curled up in a corner.
Maybe there is justice in the world after all,
he thought drowsily as he drifted off.
###
“. . . and you receive a signing bonus of two point three ounces of gold and a rate of pay of two point three ounces of gold per week for the duration of the contract,” Jerry told the selected group of programmers gathered under the awning.
“Gold?” asked Ah Akhan, the herald.
Jerry shrugged. “Simplifies matters for the employer.”
“This guy’s either a libertarian or a drug smuggler,” Karl Dershowitz said. Jerry did not reply.
Moira smiled. “We really are . . .”
“. . . not at liberty to say,” Nancy Sutton finished for her. “We know the drill.”
“Okay,” said Cindy Naismith, a short, slender woman with close-cropped brown hair. “What about performance penalties?”
“None. We can tell you so little about the project until you get on-site that it wouldn’t be fair. However there is a bonus if the contract is completed on time to the client’s satisfaction.”
He pushed the clipboard out into the middle of the table. “If you accept the terms, sign this agreement.”
Ali Akhan sat down and began to read through the six-page document. Jerry waited to see what happened when he got to the non-disclosure clause. The contract was something they had whipped together out of the pieces of contracts Jerry had in his computer at home. It was pretty much the standard verbiage—except for the non-disclosure agreement.
“. . . if this agreement is breached, employee will immediately be struck by lightning and hereby agrees to forfeit his immortal soul . . .” Ah Akhan read out. He looked up angrily. “What kind of shit is this? I mean it’s very funny, but who’s gonna believe that nonsense?”
Moira smiled sweetly. “Oh, I think we can contrive to convince, My Lord.”
“This is weird,” he muttered, reaching for a pen. Then he looked up and grinned. “You don’t want me to sign in blood do you?”
“Oh no, that will not be necessary,” Moira told him seriously.
Ah Akhan gave her a funny look and then signed his name. Taking the contract back, Jerry saw that his real name was Larry Fox.
Several other people looked at them strangely after they finished reading the contract, but none of them refused to sign it—much to Jerry’s surprise. Either things were slow in the Valley or these people were stranger than most computer types.
Considering the milieu .
. .
“Fine then,” he told the assembled group. “We will meet at the back parking lot of Los Alamitos Mall at seven o’clock Wednesday morning. Have someone drive you or leave your cars at home. Transportation will be provided from the meeting point to our destination. Come packed and ready to leave. Oh yeah. Don’t have anyone wait for you. Security, you know.”
Several people looked at him strangely. “Gotta be SDI,” someone muttered.
###
“I wish we could leave sooner,” Moira said as the newly formed team dispersed.
“I know, but we’ve got to give people time to get their affairs in order. Three days is really pushing it.”
“Oh, I know, but I just wish . . .” She looked up at him. “Besides, I miss Wiz terribly.”
Jerry studied her expression. “I’m getting kind of anxious to see him myself.”
###
Wiz stayed at the black and white palace for as long as he dared. But there wasn’t any more food to be found in the kitchen or the palace storerooms. Besides, the Dark League’s search was working its way down into the waterfront neighborhood. He could hear the wizards calling to each other as they searched the streets and warehouses.
With the search moving to the waterfront, he decided the best thing he could do was to head back to the top of the town. Maybe there would be places up there heated by the volcano.
###
“Is there aught else to do here?” Moira asked after the last of their new employees had signed and left.
“Well, we could head back tonight, but there are a couple of more people here I’d like to talk to. The king has offered us space in his motorhome. Would you mind spending the night?”
“If we left now we would have to drive back the way we came in darkness?”
“Yes.”
“Then let us stay the night,” Moira said firmly. She wasn’t looking forward to the return trip in daylight and the idea of doing it at night was more than she could stand.
###
While none of the City of Night was warm, there were definitely some parts that were colder than others. Whether because of the natural microclimate or magic, Wiz didn’t know. But this street was especially cold.
Water had trickled down the street and frozen into a layer of glare ice, dark, shiny and unbelievably slick.
Wiz picked his way up the edge of the street carefully. The last thing he needed now was a broken leg.
He was so busy watching his step that he forgot to watch where he was going. He turned the corner and literally collided with a black-robe wizard. They were both knocked flat, but Wiz recovered quicker. He spun onto his hands and knees and took off like a sprinter around the corner.
The wizard pounded around the corner hot on his heels and shouting at the top of his lungs.
“I have found him. To me! To me! I have found HHHHIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMM . . .”
Wiz ducked into a doorway and looked back to see the wizard go sliding by, flat on his back with his arms and legs waving in the air like a big black beetle. He almost laughed. Then he thought better of it and took off running as fast as he could.
When he stopped running he was more than a half a mile from the icy street. He sank to his heels with his head between his knees while he gasped in great lungfuls of the frigid air. Gradually his breath came back and he began to study his surroundings. Behind him was a gate big enough to lead an elephant through. Through it he could see a courtyard with rooms opening onto it.
One place is as good as another,
he thought. Keeping a wary eye for traps, he started exploring the building.
Nearly three hours later, Wiz stepped through the last smashed door and wrinkled his nose. The storeroom had been thoroughly ransacked, more than once from the looks of it. Besides, it smelled as if something had been lairing here.
But there was nothing here now and a storeroom seemed like the best place to find food. The buildings around this courtyard had apparently been barracks, with the workrooms, armories and storerooms that supported the soldiers. The armories had been stripped to the walls and the barracks were deserted, but there was a chance there might be something left in the storerooms.
This one didn’t look promising, he admitted as he poked among the rubble. There were bolts of cloth that had been pulled off the shelves, torn and trampled. Boxes of iron rivets had been broken open and the rivets scattered across the floor. Bundles of leather thongs, cracked and rotted hung from pegs on one wall. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where food had been kept.
Still, he was here and a quick check of the other buildings showed nothing more promising. The barracks-kitchen had been easy to locate, but there was nothing to eat there. What hadn’t been carried off had been consumed by rats or larger animals.
The City of Night was more complex than he had ever imagined, Wiz thought vaguely as he poked the piles of rubbish in the corners and turned over debris on the floor. Somewhere there had to be food storehouses to feed the people who had lived here. But he didn’t have the faintest notion where.
Wiz stopped short. There, on the very top shelf was a pottery jar with a familiar shape.
Pickled fish,
he realized. There were some districts along the Freshened Sea where salted fish was packed in vinegar with garlic, onions, vegetables, and spices and sealed in crocks to age and ferment. To the people of those districts pickled fish was a delicacy. Everyone else made jokes about it, especially about its tendency to produce gas. Apparently, the jokes about pickled fish were universal and whoever used this room had kept a personal cache here rather than listen to them.
With shaking hands he took the jar off the shelf. It was full and the clay seal around the lid was unbroken. Quickly he smashed the lid with a piece of wood from the floor.
The contents were dark brown, definitely past their prime and Wiz had made his share of jokes about pickled fish. But this was the most delicious thing he had ever eaten. Heedless of the promissory rumblings of his stomach, he finished the entire crock.
###
At 7:00 a.m., the group gathered in the back parking lot of the shopping center.
They were carrying everything from designer luggage to backpacks. One or two of them had laptop computers under their arms. Jerry wondered how well those would work where they were going. A couple more had apparently believed the Afghanistan story enough to bring cases of liquor with them. That, at least, would be useful, he decided.
“Okay, people,” he called out. “Moira here, will . . .” he looked around. “Where’s Moira?”
“Here, Lord.” Moira came trotting up with a large flat box under her arm.
“What’s in the box?” Jerry asked her.
“A present.” She handed it to him. “Will you hold it for me? Be careful not to tip it.” Then she looked up and frowned at the sky. “The haze will make it hard to tell the time,” she said. “That complicates matters. Perhaps it would be best to wait for the afternoon time.”
“That’s smog and it’s not going to clear today,” Jerry told her. “If you need to tell the time, use my watch.”
He stripped it off his meaty wrist and handed it to her.
Moira shook her head. “I must know the time in day-tenths after sunrise,” she said. “Not the time by your local system.”
“Day-tenths?”
“One-tenth of the time between sunrise and set.”
“Wait a minute,” said a small man with the face of an intelligent mouse and a mop of brown hair. He stripped off his own wristwatch, and began punching the tiny buttons beneath the face.
“There you go,” he said handing the watch. “I haven’t set it against the Naval Observatory in a couple of months so it may be a tenth of a second off, but I hope it will do.”
Moira studied the madly spinning numbers on the display. They looked something like the numbers Wiz used, but she didn’t know them well enough to use them.
She handed the watch to Jerry. “Here, My Lord. Tell me when it is two day-tenths.”
“Coming up on it now.”
“Hey, guys!”
Thorkil du Libre Dragonwatcher—Danny Gavin, Jerry reminded himself—came running across the parking lot with a backpack slung over one shoulder and bouncing against his hip.
“You are late,” Moira said severely.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I had to hitch, okay?”
Moira opened her mouth to say something else, but Jerry interrupted her.
“Time in thirty seconds.”
Moira handed her box to Jerry and gestured them all into a tight group. Then she drew out the golden cord Bal-Simba had given her and laid a circle perhaps fifteen feet in diameter in the dusty surface of the parking lot, muttering as she did so.
“Now,” she said, turning to the programmers. “You must all stand close together and above all, stay within the circle. Do not step outside it or break it in any way.”
Checking the watch Jerry had given her, she raised her wand and began to chant.
At first no one said anything. Then the astonishment began to wear off and the cracks started.
“Is this where the flying saucer shows up?” someone asked.
“Scotty, beam me up,” someone else called out.
Moira ignored them and went on with the chant.
“Next stop Oz,” Judith chimed in.
And then the world dissolved.
PART III: COMPILE
Fourteen: Employee Orientation
You never find out the whole story until after you’ve signed the contract
—programmers’ saying
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 anymore.”
“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 hen “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 went 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 dry.
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.
