The Wiz Biz (52 page)

“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 more 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 feet 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.