The Way of the Wizard

by John Joseph Adams

  The call beeps for five minutes (I’m patient) before Cristina answers in a mush of words I can’t make out.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?’ ”

  I look out my window. “Uh . . . dark?” I don’t even know what day it is. I glance at my system clock and see that it’s been a week since I was captured, and, oh, it is currently 4 AM.

  “What do you need now, Hidr?” I hear another feminine voice in the background asking a question. Christina covers the mic and I can’t make out his reply. I hear a giggle as she comes back on. “Make it quick, I have company.”

  “You always have company, you lucky girl. This won’t take long and I’ll send you a gig of mojo for your trouble. I need to know if you’ve heard of an Elder God named Baalphorum.”

  Christina hmms. “Maybe. Hold on.” The call goes quiet, then I can hear the fwit-fwit of pages flipping. “ ‘Classified as a lesser Arch-Demon. He is the Prince of Journeys Gone Afoul. A patron demon to highwaymen and cutthroats.’ The MAA banished him in the late ’40s, locked him up in a deep Outer Realm. You know, I think I’ve read somewhere that cultists over the years have made several attempts to free him. Apparently, he was an easy date back in the day. What’s going on?”

  I sigh. “It looks like someone has found a new way to bust him out.” I explain 1CB and ask if it could free the demon somehow.

  “Promised souls are souls ‘in the hand’ for some spells. He would need to quickly reap the souls or face a mystic backlash that would slingshot his thorny ass past Andromeda, but it would work.”

  I file that tidbit away for later use. “How many souls would it take for a demon of Baalphorum’s stature to break out?”

  “I have no idea. Math’s your game, pal.”

  “Give me a guess. Less than fifty thousand?”

  I can almost hear her shrug. “Probably more than that. Say, one-hundred thousand? Isn’t this what the MAA is supposed to take care of when they’re not harassing us?”

  I stammer, but there’s no sense in lying to a Socialista. They always know, especially Cristina. “They’ve got me freelancing on this problem. Their resources are tied up in getting the mundanes back.”

  A long pause. “Well, we’re all doomed then.”

  “Gotta go, Christina. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  I disconnect and call Atretius, who helpfully loaded his contact info into my phone before returning it. I start talking as soon as the call connects.

  “This whole thing is a sucker deal in disguise. It’s in the EULA.”

  There’s a long enough pause that I think maybe I’ve dropped the call, but then: “Shit. I can’t believe nobody read this thing. Do you know who or what this ‘Baalphorum’ is?”

  I give him the details. He swears again.

  “So we know where the mojo’s coming from to power the banishments,” Atretius says. “Baalphorum probably has mana stores in his prison. He shouldn’t be able to get anything out from the prison, but the MAA containment budgets have been slimmer since we’ve redirected our resources, so maybe there are some cracks showing. At least we know what Baalphorum is getting in exchange.”

  “Someone has to be helping him on this side, but fuck if I know who,” I say. Something is bothering me that I can’t quite place. “I verified that they’re hiding the server with the same trick of Chaos space that I used on mine. The only way to trace it would be to have the actual astral encryption keys that were used to create the routing table, but I don’t have the ones used to hide 1CB, so the site itself is a dead end.”

  “You better think of something quickly because . . . ” I hear the clackity-clack of a classic IBM keyboard. “The fecal matter just hit the fan. The link is out in the wild. The site just made Digg. It’ll be posted again to Metafilter and Reddit in minutes.”

  “What!” I nearly shout. “How did they get through?”

  “Someone set up a redirect engine. It’s being submitted with different URLs every time. Someone’s been busy registering domain names. I’m transferring our DoS bots to take down all the social networking sites, but it’s going to take a bit.

  “You’ve got to get out there and find who’s responsible for the site and shut them down,” Artetius says. “It’s our best chance of stopping this.”

  “Yeah, sure. There’s just the one thing. I’ve got zero leads! Well, other than that whoever put the site up knows my methods of obfuscating a server. I explained how to maybe six people in the world, but I don’t know who they really are or where they live. We’re all anonymous in Bl00d’s Cabal.”

  My phone dinged to announce new email.

  “I’ve just sent you dossiers on your cabal mates.”

  “Holy shit! You have this information?”

  Atretius yells something unintelligible in the background. “Can’t talk any longer, I need to manage things on this end. Start kicking in doors.” Click.

  I scan the files, take a look at the first name and address. Before I go, I try to equip myself better, just in case. I ransack my place for gear and I turn up my old smartphone. It has a processor slower than a turd and a whole 128 megabytes of space. But it’s better than nothing. I pocket it and then broom-port to my first “interviewee.”

  I arrive in a cramped basement apartment, coughing, eyes watering, gray all over with dust. A teenager, not a second older than fourteen, lies slumped over a keyboard snoring. The file says this is DedJonny, but I can’t believe it. It makes me feel so much older.

  I scroll through my selection of curses and prepare to squeeze him for info.

  DedJonny nearly pisses himself when I clap my hands and wake him. He babbles. “Oh shit, oh man, I didn’t do it, please, don’t—”

  “Shut up,” I say calmly. “I’m Hidr. I have some questions.”

  He looks relieved. “How’d you get through my defensive sprogs? Oh right—you wrote them, must have put in backdoors huh? That’s so chill.”

  “I’m offended you would think that. I have ethical standards,” I snap, putting on my best “angry adult” voice. “What do you know about One Click Banishment?”

  “One-what?” He blinks unconvincingly. Even an under socialized geek can see he’s lying.

  I swipe the screen on my phone and select the cactus-dick curse (see the first post in this thread). I pour 100k of mojo into the spell and hit him with it.

  It won’t last long, and the effect isn’t as pronounced as it would be with a few megabytes, but it does the job. He screams and paws his crotch, and that doesn’t make things any better.

  “I’ve got worse than that here. Do you want to see how much worse?”

  “No! It was me, okay? We go to school together, and he, he—started dating my girlfriend after we broke up—augh, why is my junk covered in needles?”

  Hmm. Not the confession I was looking for. “Who?”

  “OneEyedPete. I used the site on OneEyedPete. Isn’t that why you’re here? I knew he’d get back somehow, I just wanted to teach him a lesson is all.”

  That has the ring of truth. I dispel the curse. And by the way, DedJonny, if you’re reading this, sorry about that, man. You’ll understand why I had to do it by the end of this. I owe you some mojo.

  I don’t waste any time apologizing (I did that by writing the above). I move on to the next name on my list. And another, and so on until each one convinces me they have no idea who is behind One Click Banishment and it definitely isn’t any of them.

  It’s only when I come to the end of my list when I realize that one name is missing: “LongDongSilver.” Some of you may remember him. He was initiated into the Cabal a little bit after Bl00d’s death. He was really eager to get to know everyone then. Check his posting history. He was crude and a little naïve, but he really got the nuts and bolts of networking protocols, so I brought him in on the private networking forums.

  So how can the MAA have records on us so thorough, but be missing one Cabal member,
who just happens to have access to my private forum?

  I haven’t wanted to consider the possibility, not really. It means we’ve been infiltrated for a long time now. And it explains the detailed records.

  Just as it all makes sense, I am force-shifted across planes to the Gray Fields. It happens in a blink, without even a sound. One minute I am on the street outside a San Francisco apartment watching the sun rise, the next I am in the empty, barren wasteland of the Fields, surrounded by thousands of confused douchebags. Jocks, corrupt cops, snitches, power-hungry teachers—anyone who had ever pissed of a computer savvy geek is here, and more are arriving every minute.

  They bitch and moan like the worst has happened to them but they’re just being inconvenienced; their pranksters are going to pay for it with their souls.

  I tear off the obviously fake medallion and throw it to the ground. I walk for ten minutes until I’m away from the smell of Old Spice and sit down. I swear by the Noodly One, I will fucking pwn Magister Atretius for this.

  My phone rings. Impressive to receive a signal here, especially for AT&T. “Guess where I am?” says Atretius, a/k/a “LongDongSilver,” calling to gloat.

  I suggest something about carnal relations with a capybara.

  “Wrong. I’m in your inner sanctum, stealing your IP tablez.”

  “How the fuck?” Of course he bugged me, probably via phone. See, n00bs? Not paranoid enough.

  “Why do you want my tables?” I think I know, but I want him to say it.

  “You haven’t figured it out yet?” He laughs. “You are getting slow in your old age.”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me, junior. It must be killing you not to share your genius plan with someone.”

  He sniffs. “Do you realize how much power the Elder Ones have? He’s taught me so much already in little messages.”

  “But how has he been talking to you?”

  “I have you to thank for that. One of your routers was close enough metaphysically for him to connect to your little ethereal network. Even a ‘lesser’ being like Baalphoruum has a mind capable of more processing than every computer on the planet. They’re the original super computers. And I’m gonna have sole access to it.”

  “This is about hardware? What a nerd.” I am beginning to rethink my openmindedness towards the socially inept.

  “Of course it is! In return for freeing him, Baalphoruum has promised me twenty years of Elder-processing time. Do you know what I can accomplish with that? I could create my own pocket universe!”

  “There’s no way he’s going to let you get away with that. The Elder Ones always get the upper hand. Duh, they’re smarter than the entire planet?”

  “They are bound by laws, and my uncle’s this big-time contract lawyer. When I found his messages in your router packets—”

  “Yeah, yeah. We’ve covered this. So you were a plant in our organization from the beginning? They brought you into the MAA to infiltrate us, I bet. But you had bigger plans than being a MAA stooge. Hell, the MAA gave you the tools to make sure your stupid scheme didn’t backfire on you. And then my idiot self gave you the basic principles of my network protocols so you could make sure nobody could put a stop to your soul collector. You probably even planned to pin it all on me. That about right?”

  His silence was enough confession for me.

  “What I can’t figure though, and yeah, maybe it’s because I’m old and slow, but why in the hell would you let me out and send me to track your own scheme down? You had me locked up. I was the only person who could possibly stop you."

  I stopped, hit with revelation. “But you needed my IP tables to free him. You’re bringing him back through the routers.”

  “If there had been any other way, I would have used it. Even having captured you, there was no way you would hand over your IP tables. And finding the great Hidr’s inner sanctum didn’t work, never did. But you talked enough on the forums about your kind of girl, and dropped enough hints that I knew what city you were in, so I launched Project LittleHeadThinker. I brought you in and gave you just enough rope to run back home. Admit it, I’m just more clever than you.”

  Actually, he had just given me the means of my escape, so I guess, in a way, he was, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it.

  “There, all done.” He stopped typing. “Baalphoruum will soon be on his way. You were pretty hot shit once, Hidr, but I’ve taken the netgeek throne.”

  “You’re just keeping my seat warm, you little shit,” I shouted. I hung up, threw down the phone, and stomped it to bits. This served two purposes. It made me feel better, and it prevented the bastard from seeing what was coming next.

  Which will have to come after I write a few emails. Stay tuned for the stunning conclusion.

  Posted by Hidr at 2:15 AM Today

  Having routers stashed all over the outer planes, it turns out, is not the best idea when it comes to the safety of the world, but it comes in handy when you find yourself stuck in one of said outer planes.

  My back-up smartphone has just enough memory to run a scan sprog. I didn’t personally deliver my routers to the outer realms, but I would be an idiot if I didn’t have a way of locating them for repairs. If Baalphoruum was sending suckers to the Gray Fields, that meant I had a router along the way.

  I push through the crowds, keeping an eye out for MAA agents, following the sub-etheric signal from my router. Sure, they could get me back home, but I’d be brainwashed in the process, and that isn’t going to do anyone any good.

  After what feels like days, I locate the router, locked in its protective field, humming with mojo tapped straight from my private cloud storage space.

  I plug my piece of crap smartphone into the router with a USB cable and tap the mojo. It’s barely enough, and using it will take down my sites, but it’ll get me home.

  I might be getting old, and I might be a little out of touch with the hip things these days, but I still can code Aleph like nobody else. I whip up a matter-to-data transportation sprog based on a teleportation spell insprog based on a teleportation spell in the Maleficus. It’s probably something very similar to what Atretius is writing to bring Baalphoruum to him. I’m counting on my skills as a sprog hacker now to get me back before the demon does.

  Let me just say to you kids that being made up of nothing but encrypted UDP packets is not all its cracked up to be. Worse, my code was a little buggy, and I’m missing a toe now. I should have written better error-handling. But I got back, even if it wasn’t in entirely one piece.

  I find Atretius in my Bat Cave, my inner sanctum. He’s set up an altar that looks like it was made by Ikea. I can smell defensive sprogs thick in the air, I can taste the gigs of mojo burning up. Within a protective summoning circle of Cat-5 cables, Atretius sits coding at a laptop. He has discarded the casual wear for the traditional black robes of evil-doing. I think that the entities are kind of old-fashioned when it comes to formal wear or something. I’m determined not to let the bastard impress his master with his sense of fashion.

  I launch every attack sprog I have, which isn’t many given my crap phone. They error out immediately, stymied by the defense sprogs. Atretius doesn’t even look up. I laugh and give my attack sprogs my backdoor passwords, counting on his arrogance.

  Oh, yeah. Lesson number four: there’s always a backdoor password.

  Sure enough, he is using my own work to defend himself. They come down leaving him defenseless but also leaving me out of almost out of mojo.

  Atretius looks up then . . . and smiles.

  A rip in the fabric of space, like the universe’s own dead pixel, forms before the altar. Something huge is trying to squeeze through. Distracted by this, I’m not ready when Atretius hits me with the Manacles again. I’m down. The Magister sighs and steps out of his circle.

  “If you just pin your arms to your sides, I’ll pull on your horns,” Atretius says.

  “That’s something you know a lot about, huh? Jerking on demon horn,
” I say.

  He lets loose of the demon and turns his full attention on me. I can sense him drawing mojo from his hacked Zune. But it’s suddenly cut off by my inner sanctum’s network defenses coming online.

  “This is a nix-only house, asshole,” I say with a grin which quickly fades to terror.

  Baalphoruum exits the portal with a slurping sound, followed by a deep and teeth-shattering laugh. The demon fixes his hundreds of red eyes on Artetius. He frantically pushes buttons on his gadget to no effect.

  “YOUR SERVICES WILL NO LONGER BE REQUIRED, BARRY,” Baalphorum says in a voice like ten thousand babies crying. “I AM INVOKING THE TERMINATION CLAUSE OF OUR CONTRACT.”

  “What—what termination clause?” The “Barry formerly known as Artetius” stutters, but then his head is several feet from his neck. I guess his uncle wasn’t such hot shit at contract law after all. With the turncoat deader than Kurt Cobain (Google him, kids), the manacles dispelled.

  Unfortunately, now Baalphoruum has turned his attention to me. And it seems he’s intent on killing me slowly. He wraps a six-fingered fist around my neck and lifts me into the air to stare at me with his many fiery eyes.

  You know, I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I don’t know any badass moves to take out a demon. (I’m more old-school in my entertainment. I grew up watching a little movie called Monster Squad. You can catch it on cable every once and a while. Check it out.)

  So, lesson number five: like a wolf man, arch-demons have ’nards.

  A well-placed kick drops me to the floor and my vision fades back in around the edges. I had a plan before coming in, but I hadn’t counted on physical contact with a demon. I’m a little winded, but then, so is Baalphorum. And he’s still weak, overdrawn on soul mojo. That’s when I point and execute the Box pendant.

  Pwned. Now here is where things get tricky. The Box spell is good, but it won’t keep a demon like Baalphorum trapped for long. After I catch my breath, I hack out a little old-fashioned web code and insert it into the Box sprog.

  I didn’t actually see this next part, but I imagine this is how things went: