The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (2 page)

It would have tried the patience of a seasoned diplomat and Wiz was a long way from being any sort of diplomat. Worse, he was the only mortal the elves and others wanted to deal with and to him the meetings were a form of exquisite torture.

"Well, now what?"

Bal-Simba heaved his bulk up off the rock and picked up his wizard's staff. "That we shall know at the next full moon, Sparrow."

"You sent for me, Uncle?"

King Tosig looked up sourly at the young dwarf standing in the door of his study. His sister's niece's son was well-enough formed, with broad shoulders and powerful limbs. His beard was long and thick, as a dwarf's beard should be, and his craggy features bore a hint of the dwarf king's own.

The face was fine. It was what was behind it that was the problem.

Instead of digging, making, hoarding and other normal dwarfish pursuits, Glandurg's mind was forever on other things. Where the average dwarf is an intensely practical, rather unimaginative sort, Glandurg was a dreamer and a romantic.

The young dwarf knew that there was more to life than the tunnels and forges of his subterranean home. He just wasn't sure what. Being young, inexperienced and a romantic, he was convinced it was better than what was here.

Worse, he had gathered a group of young dwarves about him and converted them with his cockamamie chatter. They careened about the tunnels, refusing to listen to their elders and engaging in all sorts of undwarvish nonsense.

To Tosig, who was practical and unimaginative even for a dwarf, Glandurg and his friends were a constant source of trouble. If such a thing were possible Tosig would have suspected a taint of mortal blood in his ancestry.

The dwarf king forced his face into an unaccustomed smile and gestured at his visitor. "Come in, boy. And close the door behind you."

"Uncle, I really am sorry about the sewage tunnel," Glandurg began breathlessly. "But the survey showed . . ."

The dwarf king reddened at the thought of the stope flooded when that tunnel broke through, and his already perilous hold on his temper weakened. As if a dwarf had to rely on a survey to know where he was underground!

"Never mind that," he cut his near-nephew off. "I have another job for you and your friends."

"It's not another sewage tunnel, is it?" Glandurg began apprehensively. "Because if it is . . ."

"No, this is something else. Something more suited to your talents. Oh sit down, boy! Sit!" He shooed the young dwarf into a three-legged chair in front of his desk.

Apprehensive at this unprecedented honor, Glandurg sank into the chair, his eyes riveted on Tosig's face.

"Now then," said Tosig, composing his thoughts. "You know I had an embassy from the trolls this evening?"

Glandurg nodded eagerly. "Three mighty kings of the trolls—or so it is said." His face fell. "I was on guard duty on the peaks."

Tosig nodded. He did not mention he had given standing orders to keep Glandurg out of the throne room during audiences.

"The trolls came asking a great favor and for reasons of state I have decided to grant their request."

Glandurg leaned forward expectantly.

"The trolls are threatened by a new wizard who has arisen among the mortals. A wizard from beyond the World, bringing with him strange and powerful magic. Our allies the trolls suffer cruelly under his influence and they beg succor."

He fixed his young relative with an eagle stare. "You are to be their succor. I want you to gather a troop of hardy adventurers and kill the human wizard with the new magic."

Glandurg gulped. "You mean go Outside? Out into the World?"

"Well, you're not going to find him in our tunnels are you?" Tosig snapped.

"No, I mean, of course not, but . . ."

The dwarf king glared and the young dwarf trailed off. Glandurg was all for adventure and travel, in the abstract. But now that he was facing the possibility of leaving the tunnels where he had lived all his 184 years, he discovered he wasn't so sure he wanted to go.

"We'll need supplies," he said at last. "And gold."

Tosig's stomach flared again, but he nodded. "Anything you need. Within reason, boy! Within reason. Now, how soon can you leave?"

"I don't know. A week perhaps."

Tosig nodded. "A week if you must, then. Sooner if you can. Our allies depend on us in this and I am depending on you."

Glandurg's face glowed.

"Thank you, Uncle. I will strive to prove myself worthy." He bowed deeply and then whirled and raced out the door, slamming it behind him.

As the door reverberated behind his young relative, King Tosig allowed himself a tight little smile.

A debt was a debt and debts must be paid, even to trolls.
On the other hand,
he thought,
nowhere it is written what coin they must be paid in.
Clearly there must be an effort to crush this Sparrow, but if the effort failed and one of his blood relatives perished in the attempt, why, who could blame the king or his people? Even mortal magicians were not without defenses after all.

He shifted and the pain in his stomach came back, but not so bad this time. Maybe he wouldn't need the ground chalk after all.

"Dammit, they're stalling!" Danny said as the group picked its way along the trail in the moonlight. "They're just keeping us hanging."

"Why?" asked Jerry. "It doesn't get them anything."

"I dunno why," Danny said stubbornly, "but we're being stalled."

Wiz walked beside his fellows, too tired to join the argument. Pointless anyway, he thought. No matter what their motives are we've got to keep negotiating with them. It's the best we've got.

Behind them Ian made a tentative whimper. June quickly hushed him.

"I thought you were going to leave her home," Wiz said in an undervoice as he jerked his head back at June.

"Well, I tried," Danny said defensively. "But she came anyway. You can't argue with her. It's like she doesn't hear."

"If you can't keep her at home maybe it would be better if you didn't come to these things."

"No way, man. This is where stuff is happening. Besides, she's not a problem. She just sits with me." Wiz saw the angry jut of his jaw and decided to try a different approach.

"Okay, but it can't be good for the baby to be out in this weather. And it will be even colder next full moon."

Danny's expression cleared as he thought about it. "Yeah. You're right. Maybe I should stay home."

Wiz nodded. The new Danny could be just as obnoxious as the know-it-all kid who had come to this world a little over a year ago, but at least you could reason with him.

More or less,
Wiz reminded himself.

At the base of the enchanted hill Bal-Simba motioned the party to halt in a clearing. They clustered together while he began the chant to transport them back to the Capital on the Wizard's Way.

A quickly spoken spell, a flash of familiar darkness and they were standing on the flagstones of the Outer Court of the Wizard's Keep, just inside the main gates of the castle.

Wiz blinked at the brightness of the lantern-lit courtyard after the moonlit forest clearing.

"You know, this is still wrong," Jerry said as the guardsmen hurried to open the inner gate that separated the Outer Court from the Keep proper.

"Looks fine to me," Wiz said as his wife Moira came through the gate to meet him. The mellow glow of the lanterns caught the coppery highlights in her red hair and warmed the creamy tones of her freckled skin. She was easily the best thing Wiz had seen all day and he hugged her tight and kissed her soundly.

"No, think about it," Jerry persisted as Wiz and Moira broke the clinch. "We just teleported in here. But what about the velocity differences caused by the rotation of the planet? There should be a speed difference. And there's the energy gradient, and . . ."

Moira's green eyes gleamed with amusement. "Has he been like this all evening, love?"

"Just since we got back," Wiz told her.

But . . ." Jerry interjected.

Wiz was in no mood for one of Jerry's attempts to apply the finer points of physics to this world. "It's magic, okay?"

"Yeah," Jerry persisted as they went through the inner gate, "but magic has rules."

"But that doesn't mean we understand them."

"Still . . ."

"Look, there are a lot weirder things about this place than some missing energy when we teleport. Let's leave it, all right?"

Jerry looked at him sympathetically.

"You're really beat, aren't you?"

Wiz sighed and put his arm around Moira's waist. "Yeah, but at least that's over for another month. Maybe we can concentrate on writing software for a while."

"Oh, a week at least," Jerry said. "Then we've got a couple of other loose ends to deal with."

Wiz thought about those "loose ends" and glared at his friend. "You had to remind me, didn't you?"

The day was bright, the air was crisp and Judith Conally was off in a world full of dragons, elves and heroes.

So Prince Leopold slays the dragon Ferocious before he meets the wood elves, she thought as the trolley car jolted to a stop in front of the San Jose Public Library. But then where does he meet Bronwyn Halfelven? It can't be in the troll's cave. That's too trite. And if he kills the dragon before he confronts Gorbash F1eshripper, why does Bronwyn agree to accompany him on the quest? 

She sighed and shifted on the hard fiberglass seat. Her fellow passengers ignored her. Their thoughts might not be as colorful as Judith's, but they were just as lost in them.

Externally, Judith was no different from the other passengers. Her clothing was more comfortable than stylish and while no one would have called her ugly, they wouldn't have called her beautiful either. Her long dark hair was lustrous, but it was caught back in a severe bun. Her figure was substantial rather than eye-catching, her jaw was square and her nose on the large side. She looked, well, ordinary.

Judith sighed again and rose with the rest of the passengers. Working out the details of a novel wasn't nearly as easy as she had thought. Maybe she could find a solution in the book on Celtic magic the library had gotten her through interlibrary loan. If not she would have to invent something that would be magically consistent with the universe she had created.

Problems, problems. She never knew being a successful fantasy author could be this difficult.

Well, almost a successful fantasy author,
she admitted as she stepped down onto the trolley platform. The outline of her trilogy had caught the eye of an editor at Nemesis Books. The sample chapters had passed muster and now the editor wanted to see the completed manuscript of the first novel.

The other passengers had stepped off the platform to cross the street in either direction, but Judith still stood there, trying to decide.

For a moment she concentrated on dragons. Not dragons as they were—quarrelsome, nasty-tempered beasts that stank of sulfur and snake—but dragons as she had first seen them. Mighty, ethereal creatures printed against the pale pink glow of clouds at earliest morning as they swooped around the tower of the Wizard's Keep.

She was bound by oath not to reveal what she had seen in that other world. As part of the small team of programmers who had taken Wiz Zumwalt's crude magic compiler and turned it into a piece of production software, she had really experienced magic and dragons and the rest of it. She couldn't
directly
refer to her time in a world where magic worked and dragon riders were as common as 747s are here. But she could draw on what she had seen and done to make her novel come alive. And most of all she had the memories to sustain her as she struggled to write.

As always thinking about her time in another world refreshed her. Judith started to cross to the library, head high and still lost in thought.

Can I do it in two trilogies? she wondered as she stepped off the curb. Or will I need to stretch it to three? 

If Judith was lost in thought, the truck driver was just plain lost. He had driven the semi all the way from Minneapolis to deliver a load of exhibits to the San Jose convention center next to the library. But he had gotten his directions mixed up and instead of arriving at the back of the center and the loading docks, he ended up in front of the building, on a street that wasn't supposed to have truck traffic. He certainly didn't know the neighborhood well enough to realize that people on the trolley platform in the center of the street were given to crossing no matter what the traffic light said.

The blare of the horn and the screech of air brakes brought Judith half out of her reverie. Instinctively she jumped back as the driver yanked the wheel desperately in an effort to avoid her.

Together it was almost enough. Instead of receiving an obliterating blow from the truck's front bumper, Judith Conally was only kissed by the left fender. But the kiss was near as deadly as a blow. Her purse flew out of her hands in a high arc, opening in mid-air and spilling wallet, tissues, keys and coins along the curbside. Limbs flailing, Judith spun away and slammed headfirst into the curb.

She did not move again.

A woman and a dragon waited for them when they entered the programmers' quarters in the Wizard's Keep.

Of the two the woman was slightly the larger and by far the more formidable. Shauna was broadbeamed with brown hair and an easy gap-toothed smile. She had an infant daughter of her own and she was more than happy to nurse Ian—and mother June and Danny as well.

"My Lords, Lady," she curtsied. "I have a cold supper waiting."

"Thanks," Wiz said, "but I'll just have something to drink." He drew a mug of ale from the small cask at the end of the table and plopped down on a bench along the wall. It was something past midnight, but all of them were too keyed up to sleep. A light meal and light conversation had become a ritual after meeting with the non-humans by the light of the full moon.

Shauna surveyed Wiz's thin frame disapprovingly. "You'll never put on any meat that way." Then she turned to June. "Here child, let me hold the baby and you get yourself something to eat."