by Rick Cook
He could edge around the courtyard under the colonnade, but that would expose him to anything that might be hidden in the deepening shadows or lurking in one of those rooms. The main entrance was directly across from the gate and in this case the better part of valor seemed to be a dash across the center of the court.
Place like this ought to have a lot more in it than a barracks, he thought as he looked around carefully for the last time. Then again, maybe not. A place like this would attract looters.
He was halfway across the courtyard when he had another thought. A place like this would have been guarded, too.
Then the ground opened up beneath him.
Jerry and Moira stepped out the door into a world Moira found completely unsettling. The sky was gray but the night was not foggy. She wrinkled her nose. The air stank—an odd pungent reek like nothing she had ever smelled before.
In front of them was a large flat area whose black surface was marked with white lines. Here and there curiously shaped and brightly painted metal boxes or sheds stood on the dark surface. Lights on tall metal poles cast an orangish-pink glare over the scene. In the background she heard a continuous whooshing roar.
All in all, it was an unsettling place, stranger than she had imagined. Yet Wiz had come from here so it must be all right.
"Okay," Jerry told her, "the next question is where do we go to eat."
"My Lord, could we get pizza?"
"Right. Pizza it is. Little Italy’s just around the corner. Come on, we’ll walk." He set off toward the gate with Moira trailing behind.
The Little Italy was the sort of place that develops both regular clients and an idiosyncratic style over the years.
It was four o’clock on Saturday morning, but Mario, the owner, was behind the counter, baking loaves of bread to be used in the day’s sandwiches. Jerry knew that at seven Mario’s son would relieve him so the old man could go home and get a few hours sleep. Then he would be back for the lunch rush, take a nap in the afternoon and come back for the dinner crowd.
"Well, what do you want?" Jerry said as they came up to the counter. Mario stopped shaping loaves of dough and came up to wait on them.
"Pizza," Moira told him.
"Yeah, but what do you want on your pizza? What toppings?"
"Toppings?"
"Those things listed on the board."
Moira frowned. "Lord, I cannot read your language," she confessed.
"Look in the bins then." He pointed at the row of stainless steel containers lining the rear of the counter.
"What are you having?" she asked Jerry.
"I"ll have my usual. Sausage, ham, salami, pepperoni, hamburger and extra cheese. Medium, to eat here."
Mario nodded and got to work, swabbing the dough with spicy red tomato sauce redolent with basil and oregano. Next he scooped up handfuls of coarsely grated cheese and sprinkled them lavishly over the pizza. He didn’t stop until the cheese hid nearly every trace of the sauce.
"Do you want the same thing?" Jerry asked.
"That is a great deal of meat," Moira said dubiously as the old man piled on the toppings. "I think I would prefer something else." She looked at Jerry. "I can have any of those I want?"
"Or any combination. If you come up with an unusual combination Mario names it after you." He nodded toward the board. "Wiz had one up there for a while. Something with jalapeños and pepperoni."
"I want Wiz’s pizza."
Mario shook his head. "Don’t got no jalapeños."
The hedge witch’s brow furrowed and she went back to frowning at the bins, absently brushing back her coppery hair as it fell forward.
"Made up your mind yet, lady?" Mario asked, setting Jerry’s pizza aside.
"What are those?" she asked, pointing to one of the bins.
"Anchovies," Jerry told her. "Highly salted fillets of tiny fish."
"I want some of those on mine," Moira said, looking over the bins. "And onions. Lots of onions. Oh, and is that garlic? Can I have some of that as well?
"And what is that on the end, floating in water?"
"That’s feta. Goes on the gyros."
"It looks wonderful. I would have that on my pizza as well."
Jerry and Mario exchanged looks, but the counterman marked the order down.
"By the way lady, what’s your name?"
"Why do you wish to know?"
"Because," Mario said, "if you eat that, I’m gonna put it on the menu and name it after you."
Even deathtraps need regular maintenance. This one had not been touched since the City of Night fell and it might have been damaged by the earthquakes touched off by the attack. That, and an instinct to keep his feet together, saved Wiz.
Wiz shook his head and climbed slowly to his feet. He was bruised, stunned and his ankles ached from the shock of landing, but he was alive and basically unhurt. He looked up and saw a strip of daylight disappearing as the trap door swung slowly closed with a creaking of unoiled hinges. The door didn’t close all the way and by the dim light coming though the remaining crack, Wiz took stock of his surroundings.
On either side of the pit was a contrivance of rotting wood and rusty iron spikes as long as his arm. Wiz wasn’t at all sure what it was supposed to do and he didn’t want to think about it too closely. Whatever it was, it wasn’t working and that had saved him.
Still, his position was precarious enough. The trap was shaped like a bottle, narrow above where the trap door was and wider down at the bottom. Even if the pit had not been twenty feet deep It would have been impossible to climb back out.
Wiz looked around. He didn’t think he was going to get out of this without help and right now he didn’t have the faintest idea where he could find help.
"… so you see, My Lord," Moira said, "Wiz needs help."
They had taken a booth in the back while they waited for their pizza and Moira filled Jerry in on his cubicle-mate’s adventures and current plight.
Jerry considered. The more he considered, the less likely the whole thing became. There was no way that Wiz Zumwalt could ever have landed someone like the redheaded dish sitting across from him. The rest of her story didn’t sound too plausible either.
Still… When a beautiful woman drops into your lap out of thin air, the event demands some explanation. Hers was no more outrageous than any other theory Jerry could come up with.
"Okay, I believe you," Jerry said. "But it’s not going to be as simple as you think."
"Pizza’s ready," Mario called from the counter.
"Excuse me, I’ll get them."
Moira fidgeted until he returned with the two steaming pizzas and paraphernalia. He set them down and shook a dash of red pepper flakes onto his.
"Want some?"
Moira looked at the shaker and liberally lashed her pizza with them.
"Careful, those are hot."
The hedge witch frowned and shook some flakes into her palm and popped a hefty pinch into her mouth.
"So they are," she agreed and added some more to her pizza.
Jerry sighed and took a bite of his own pizza. A couple of slices of pepperoni fell off the heaped toppings and onto the table.
"What is that?" Moira asked, pointing and wrinkling her nose.
"That’s pepperoni," Jerry said. Here," he picked a slice off his pizza, "taste it."
The hedge witch drew away. "Thank you, no. It smells spoiled. I do not mean to be discourteous, My Lord, but I do not see how you can eat that."
Jerry eyed Moira’s anchovy, onion, garlic and feta cheese pizza and said nothing.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, Jerry devouring about half his pie and Moira finishing her first slice.
"My Lord," Moira asked finally, "would you be willing to help us?"
"Oh sure. My deal with ZetaSoft is about through. But it isn’t that simple."
He took another enormous bite of pizza and dribbled sausage crumbs and a piece of mushroom back onto his plate.
"If w
hat you say is true you’re going to need a lot more than me," Jerry said around the mouthful of pizza. "You’re talking about taking a one-man program and turning it into full production software, with documentation, a bullet-proof user interface and probably a suite of programmers’ tools as well."
Moira regarded him seriously but uncomprehending.
"Now, I presume there’s some sort of deadline on this thing?"
"We need it as quickly as possible."
"Okay, that’s do-able, but not with just one more programmer. We’ve got to have more people. We need a full team."
Moira helped herself to another slice of pizza. "Can we get them?"
Jerry considered. "There are some problems. For one thing it will be expensive."
Moira set down her slice of pizza. From the folds of her skirt, she produced a leather pouch. She opened the drawstring and tipped it up. A ringing cascade of golden coins rained out between the hot pepper flakes, grated parmesan and napkin dispenser. One or two of them rang tinnily against the pizza pans.
Behind the counter, Mario continued with his baking, oblivious to the fortune that had just been poured onto one of his Formica table tops.
Jerry stared and licked his lips, tasting pizza grease. Conservatively this redhaired space cadet had just put about $25,000 on the table—literally.
"Will that be enough?" Moira asked innocently. "I can get more, but it would mean another Summoning."
"Lady, for that kind of money we could buy a couple of software startups, programmers and all!" Jerry said fervently.
Then he stopped and frowned. "But that’s only half of it. We’ll have to recruit them and that’s not going to be easy. You need the people fast, right?"
Moira nodded.
"You also need them good. They’re going to have to pick up on a new language and a whole new operating environment and charge right into work. This is not gonna be a job for BASIC bozos or COBOL drones."
Moira nodded vigorously. She didn’t know what BASIC or COBOL were, except that Wiz said they caused brain damage in those who used them.
"Now there’s another thing. This has to be done secretly, correct?"
"We have no objection to telling those of your world how you aided us. Bal-Simba and the Council would not be so mean as to deny them credit."
"The Council?"
"The Council of the North. The wizards who oversee our land. They would gladly provide testimonial."
Jerry thought about what a letter of recommendation from a council of wizards would look like in his resume file.
"Totally secret," he said firmly. "And we need to find the people in a hurry."
"Is there some guild hall or chantry where we might go to find people?"
Jerry considered while he polished off another slice.
"Well, the headhunters are out, that’s for sure."
"I should hope so! We need these people alive."
"That’s not what I meant—although with the kind of candidates headhunters turn up it can be hard to tell if they are alive."
"You make sport of me."
"A little, maybe. But it’s going to complicate things." He reached for the last slice of pizza on his plate.
"So what we need," he summed up, "are people who are good enough to do the job, who are available and who can be made to believe you." And, he added silently, who are crazy enough to come along on something this dangerous. "That’s not a common combination."
Jerry’s eyes fell on one of the handbills tacked to the bulletin board. Even from this distance he could see the picture of the man in full armor and the woman in a long dress.
"I think," he said slowly, "I know just the place."
Jerry took Moira home with him for the night. "There are no motels close by and I live near enough to walk," he explained as they trudged the deserted streets.
Moira simply nodded, unconcerned by the proprieties.
She was yawning behind her hand by the time they reached his apartment. He offered her his bed but she would not hear of it. So he settled her on the couch in his cluttered living room with a blanket and pillow.
"Tomorrow we’ll get an early start," he told her. "The place is about an hour and a half from here and it may take us all day to find the people we need."
"Good night, My Lord," Moira said, drawing the blanket over her.
Jerry left her and headed into the bedroom. If she’s not here in the morning I’m not going to believe any of this! he vowed to himself.
Thirteen: Recruiting Drive
If you eat a live toad first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen all day long.
California saying
To you or the toad.
Niven’s restatement of California saying
well, most of the time anyway…
programmer’s caveat to Niven’srestatement of California saying
Wiz spent a cold, miserable night in the freezing pit. With the dawn his prospects didn’t look any brighter. If he didn’t get out of here he was going to die of hunger and thirst. Actually, he’d probably die of the cold before he could die of hunger or thirst.
Face it, he told himself as he looked around for the hundredth time, the only way this could get worse would be for the sorcerers to find you.
Up above there was a scraping, as if something was clawing at the cover of the pit. With a groaning of hinges the cover moved aside and a shaft of sunlight streamed down into the depths.
Wiz looked up and saw a huge scaled head peering down at him. The dragon cocked its head to one side and ran its forked pink tongue over its ivory fangs.
Okay, Wiz thought, so I was wrong.
The dragon was a late adolescent, not yet grown to the point of acquiring true intelligence, but not far short of it. It was obviously one of the mounts for the Dark League’s dragon cavalry, gone feral.
That meant the animal had all the ferocity native to dragonkind and not the least fear of man.
Again the forked tongue licked out, tasting the air in the pit. Then its lips curled back revealing even more of ripping fangs and the animal growled.
Wiz shrank back against the wall as the dragon inhaled deeply. Instinctively he crouched and turned his back even through he knew it wouldn’t help him.
With a whoosh the dragon blasted a gout of flame down into the hole.
It was the shape of the trap that saved him. The dragon aimed his fire at Wiz, but Wiz was back out of sight under the overhang. That meant the full force of the dragon fire struck the rock walls of the neck.
The rock was wet, soaked from the eternal damp and the dragon’s fire converted a good portion of the moisture into steam. The overhang protected Wiz, but the dragon got a burst of live steam square in the face.
Dragons are not immune to dragon fire, and still less to steam. The beast snapped its head back and roared a high whistling scream like a tea kettle gone berserk. It jerked back from the pit, whipped around and galloped off, roaring and screaming at the top of its lungs.
Son of a bitch! Wiz thought as the dragon’s screams faded into the distance. He drew a deep lungful of moist warm air that stank of sulfur and dragon and looked around the pit in wonder.
I’m alive. Son of a bitch! He was still trapped in the pit and he was still hunted, but he was alive.
Wiz threw back his head and laughed at the wonder of it all.
"Rise and shine," Jerry said as he came out of the bedroom. "We need to get an early start today."
It was mid-morning, which didn’t strike Moira as particularly early, but she didn’t comment. She watched fascinated as Jerry pulled a couple of packages out of the refrigerator’s freezer compartment and popped them into the microwave oven.
"Breakfast will be ready in a couple of minutes. The bathroom’s over there if you need to freshen up." Moira nodded and went through the door. Most of the fixtures were strange to her, but fortunately Wiz had told her enough about his world that she was able to figure things out.
"Hope you like country breakfast," Jerry said. "I wasn’t expecting company and it’s all I’ve got."
The microwave oven beeped and Jerry removed the boxes. Moira opened hers and poked the contents dubiously with her fork. The eggs were tough, the sausage patty tougher and had an odd metallic taste besides. The biscuit and gravy were steaming hot on the surface and icy in the interior. If this was the "fast food" Wiz had raved about there was something seriously wrong with the man’s taste buds.
She looked over at Jerry, who was busy shovelling the contents of his box into his mouth.
Well, I have eaten worse, she thought. Wordlessly she began eating what was in front of her.
Jerry drank coffee with his meal. Moira, who had wanted to taste this beverage Wiz had talked about, took one sip and stuck with water.
The day was bright but overcast. Except for the odd stink in the air, it was very pleasant.
"It will take us about an hour and a half to get there," Jerry said as he unlocked the door of his Toyota. "Depending on traffic, of course."
He held the door open for Moira and then went around and slid behind the wheel. Once in he reached back behind himself and pulled a dark cloth strap diagonally across his body. Then he looked at her.
"Strap in."
Moira looked at him, puzzled.
"Reach behind you and pull the belt out, bring it across and buckle it over beside the seat. No, you’ve got to pull it out smoothly or it won’t come all the way."
With much tugging and contortions, Moira got the lap and shoulder belts fastened.
"It’s for your own good," Jerry told the hedge witch. "It will protect you in case of a crash."
"A crash?" Moira echoed faintly.