The Wiz Biz (47 page)

###

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 user’s 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 Wizard’s 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 walking. “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?”