The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (8 page)

"Boy, I didn't think that would work," Craig said. "When the old lady showed up I was sure we were dead."

Mike looked at him contemptuously. "All you have to do is act sincere and be polite. Then people will believe any bullshit you feed them. Especially the old farts."

Neither of them said anything as they studied the papers and notebook. Their coffee arrived and Craig hardly looked up to add extra sugar and nearly a whole pitcher of creamer. Mikey sipped his black, apparently oblivious to the heat.

"It looks like the whole damn language is here," Craig said finally. "Weird-looking stuff, though."

"You expected maybe ANSI C? Of course this shit's weird. Look at what it does."

Craig put his hand down on the stack of papers and leaned across the table to Mikey, eyes glowing. "You know what this is? I mean really? It's the road to your heart's desire. Anything you want."

"So, what do you want?"

Craig hesitated. "I guess a better world. Where people really care about people, you know?"

Mikey looked amused. "No, I don't know. Tell me."

Craig fidgeted. "I dunno. But we went wrong here. I mean with all the pollution and shit. We've just squeezed the beauty out of the way we live. There's no magic in the world."

He toyed with the spoon in his coffee. "Maybe with magic we can build something better. Something that uses magic and technology both in the way they were supposed to be used."

Outside the traffic rushed by.

"What about you? What's your heart's desire?"

Mike grinned lopsidedly. "That's easy. I want to be master of all I survey."

"Getting there is half the fun."

—Wrong-way Corrigan 
 

"I thought we were going outside," Ragnar the dwarf complained as he puffed along under a pack nearly as large as he was.

"We are," Glandurg told him as he led his band up the sloping passageway. Each of the dwarves was nearly buried in weapons, food and other necessities for the journey.

"This doesn't lead to the gate. The only things up here are the watch posts."

"You will see," Glandurg assured his men. "Step lively now."

The corridor grew steeper until finally it challenged even the surefootedness of the dwarves, burdened as they were. The way was narrower here above the highest of the workshops and habitations and the walls and floor rougher. The tunnel began to turn more frequently as the very mountain narrowed toward its peak. Several times they passed doors leading to lookout posts on the mountain itself. The dwarves guarding the doors did not salute them as they passed, but they didn't try to stop them either. That was reassuring to Glandurg's followers, who still had trouble believing that King Tosig had trusted his ne'er-do-well relative with an important mission.

Finally, just when it seemed the trail couldn't get any steeper or the mountain any narrower, Glandurg stopped in front of an iron door set in the rock. Fumbling in his pouch he produced a large key and turned it in the lock. Soundlessly the door swung open and blinding daylight flooded into the tunnel.

Hard on each others heels the dwarves tumbled out onto the mountain top. They were standing on a broad, flat expanse of dark gray stone. Squinting off in the distance they could see the other peaks of the Southern Forest Range, most of them lower than they were now. Beyond the mountains in every direction stretched the dark green of the Wild Wood, cut here and there with the meandering silver thread of a river.

None of them had ever been this high on the mountain and most of them had been outside their home tunnels perhaps a half-dozen times in their lives. It was an intoxicating sight and they peered in every direction, jabbering excitedly as they pointed out features to one another.

Glandurg ignored his unsophisticated comrades and strode toward the edge of the open space. He reached into his pouch and produced a polished bone whistle, elaborately carved in dwarvish fashion. Placing it to his lips he blew loud and hard, but no sound came from it. He scanned the skies and then blew again.

The response came not from the air as he expected, but from behind him. There was a scrabbling sound and a griffin leapt lightly down into the center of the ledge.

There was a gasp from Glandurg's followers and they shrank away from the apparition which had appeared in front of them. Glandurg gulped, terribly aware that the griffin was between him and the door to safety. But he put on his best leader's manner and strode toward the beast in what he hoped was a good imitation of fearlessness.

The other dwarves were under no such burden. They moved back against the doorway, ready to vanish down their tunnel to safety at the first sign of a hostile move.

The griffin managed to look smug, amused and dangerous all at the same time. The dwarves were on her turf and they all knew it.

Dwarves and griffins shared the mountains in an uneasy truce. The griffins nested on the uppermost crags and the dwarves tunneled through the rock. Dwarf mothers frightened their children into obedience with tales of dwarf children who had wandered away and been seized and eaten by griffins. By the same token dwarves were known to enjoy the occasional griffin egg surreptitiously taken from the nest.

"I told you we would ride," Glandurg said as he strode to the griffin.

The griffin hissed loudly and backed away.

"But you agreed to take us to the human wizard," Glandurg protested.

The griffin nodded.

"Well," said an exasperated Glandurg, "if we don't ride how will you get us there?"

The griffin smiled—as much as a creature with the beak of an eagle can smile—and flexed its claws.

Craig scowled as he riffled through the papers spread out on Mikey's coffee table. The clock display in the upper-right corner of the television set showed it was after midnight, but he paid no more attention to that than he did to the old movie on the screen. He took another pull on the can of grape soda and slammed it down, slopping sticky purple fluid on Judith's notes.

"We got a problem."

Mikey looked up from the recliner where he was curled up with Judith's notebook. "Like what?"

"How are we going to get to this other world?"

"Judith got over there, didn't she?"

"Yeah, but someone took her."

Mikey considered for a moment. "What about that first guy, the one she called Wiz? He got there on his own, didn't he?"

"No, he was taken over too. By one of their wizards." Craig drained the last of the soda and threw the empty can in the general direction of the wastebasket. "Great! So we've got all this magic and stuff and we can't do anything with it."

Mikey laughed and shook his head.

"What's so goddamn funny?"

"You. You're talking like a system administrator. If it's not obvious or it's not in the manual, it can't be done. What you need to do is chill out and keep working on this stuff."

"What good does that do?" Craig asked, half-sullen.

"The more you learn, the easier it is to make things happen. That's the secret of hacking. You don't worry if something seems impossible. You just keep watching and learning and pretty soon it's not impossible."

He stood up and stretched on tiptoes, leaning far back to work the kinks out of his spine. "Now here, we can't get over ourselves, but maybe we can get someone to bring us over."

"How?"

"We make something like a beacon. Something that says 'here we are, come get us.' "

"Can we do that?"

"Your friend thought so. She worked out a way to do it."

He flipped open the notebook and put it on the coffee table. "See?"

Craig studied the block diagram scribbled on the page. "I don't think that's gonna be easy."

Mikey grinned lopsided. "So? Nothing that's worth having is."

Craig was right. It wasn't easy. Judith's notes had no more than outlined the beacon spell. It was broken down into modules, but half the modules hadn't been written and several of the ones that had been needed modification.

Worse, they were flying blind. They had no way of testing anything because the magic compiler didn't work in their world. All they could do was check and re-check their work manually and hope they had everything correct.

They didn't have much in the way of tools. Judith had started work on a cross-compiler for the magic language that would run on an MS-DOS computer, but it was only a skeleton. She had written a sort of a syntax checker for the magic language that worked something like
lint
for C. But like
lint
it flagged all possible errors. Since there was no way of running a test compile, they had to be "more Catholic than the fucking Pope," as Mikey put it, and correct everything that the checker flagged.

Mikey ended up picking the basic approaches and doing the broad outlines while Craig did the detail work and coding. Partially this was because Craig wasn't very good at the big-picture stuff and partially because that was just the way it worked out, somehow. That meant that while Craig spent hours sweating over the grunt work, Mikey lounged around the apartment drinking beer and playing computer games.

Since both of them were system breakers they worked essentially around the clock, catching naps when they felt like it and ordering in from fast-food joints when they got hungry. Thus it was nearly three o'clock in the morning when Craig came in to tell Mikey they were finished.

"I'll get some sleep and then we can go over the whole thing one more time," he said to Mikey's back. "What are you playing anyway?"

"Empire."

Craig nodded. He was familiar with the game. You explored an unmapped world, captured cities and built armies and fleets while the computer did the same thing. Eventually you met the computer's forces in a climactic battle for control of the planet.

"Looks like you've got him on the run," Craig said, surveying the map on the screen. "One or two more turns and he'll surrender."

"He surrendered a while ago," Mikey said, maneuvering about thirty aircraft to attack the sprinkling of enemy armies in the upper left corner of the screen.

"So why are you still playing?"

"Because I want to crush the motherfucker," Mikey said as his legions of aircraft tore into the opposing forces. Most of the armies went down under the onslaught, but one beat off five separate attacks.

"Die, you cocksucker!" Mikey snarled as he used the mouse to mass even more air forces against the remaining red marker on the screen.

"I always quit when the computer surrenders," Craig told him as he watched over his friend's shoulder.

"I don't want surrender. I want him wiped out," Mikey said without taking his eyes off the confrontation.

Craig took a swig of soda. "Takes too long that way."

"Yeah, but when it's over I'm the only one left standing."

The computer beeped as its final army vanished under the combined attack of nearly twenty aircraft.

This is extremely undignified, Glandurg thought as he watched the green forest sail by beneath him. Warriors should ride into battle, not be carried along like a sack of meal. 

Behind him came eleven more griffins, each carrying a dwarf dangling from its talons.

Still, there are advantages, he admitted. It would be hard to hold on riding griffin-back. 

Craig looked at the stuff laid out on the coffee table dubiously. Some of it, like the sheets of typing paper with the spell written on them, was perfectly ordinary. Others, like the hibachi full of glowing coals, were ordinary but out of place. Still others, like the roots and powders he and Mikey had scoured Chinatown to find, were just plain odd. The table had been shoved to the center of the room and a circle drawn around it in blue marking chalk.

Mikey had just finished placing the black, white and red candles at the points of an invisible star outside the circle. He used the tape measure to check the distances between them and then did a quick calculation on his HP calculator.

"That should do it," he said, carefully stepping over the chalk mark to join Craig at the coffee table.

"Give me your hand."

"What do you want that for?"

Mikey picked up the Exacto knife lying next to the hibachi. "I don't, I want some of your blood."

Craig winced as Mikey drove the point into his fingertip. "Hey! Not so rough, okay?"

But the blood flowed freely and Mikey held Craig's hand over the hibachi, letting the dark red drops drip onto the glowing coals.

Craig wrinkled his nose at the odor, but Mike didn't seem to notice. He reached into the coffee cup, picked up a four-finger pinch of the powder there and cast it onto the coals where Craig's blood still sizzled. The powder sparkled as it hit the charcoal and heavy sweet-smelling smoke boiled up out of the hibachi.

Craig coughed and his eyes watered, but he grabbed Mike's outstretched hands in his across the glowing coals. Then he looked down at the notes to the side of the hibachi and both of them began to chant, reading the words in unison.

The smoke got thicker and thicker until Craig could hardly see the paper and the sweetish, pungent odor made his head swim. He shut out the discomfort and chanted for all he was worth as the room began to shimmer and dissolve around him.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

—Old Arab proverb 
 

 

So with friends like these, who needs enemies?

—Old Jewish proverb 
 

Smoke and fire and candlelight . . .

At first Craig thought the place was on fire. There was smoke or fog everywhere and a dim red light coming from the wrong angle. Between the smoke and the dim red light, Craig couldn't see very well and somehow he was very glad for that. What he could see was
wrong,
like an optical illusion.

They were in a cave, or maybe on a mountain crag. The ground under them was rough rock, kind of, and it sloped away so steeply that Craig was afraid to take a step. The air was thin and hard to breathe, or maybe just so full of smoke there wasn't much oxygen in it. His chest heaved as he sucked great, unsatisfying lungs full. He clutched Mikey's hands tight in his own. Mikey squeezed back so hard Craig's hands hurt.