by Rick Cook
“I think,” Wiz said brightly, “that I may scream. In fact I’m on my way up to the battlements to do just that.”
“I am not unfamiliar with the feeling.”
“Want to join me?”
“I have never found it a particularly productive exercise.”
Wiz made a face. “Has it ever occurred to you that trying to exercise leadership around this place is like herding cats?”
“Quite recently,” his companion said dryly. “Sparrow, you already know what I think of this enterprise.”
“Almost, I’m coming to share your view. Almost.”
“Concerned about your companions?”
“Wouldn’t you be?” He ticked them off on his fingers. “June’s crazy, Malkin’s a kleptomaniac adrenaline junkie, Danny’s still kind of wild and Glandurg is just plain dangerous.”
Bal-Simba didn’t argue. “Even so, they will be at your side in this business, and if you are determined to do this thing it were best if you counted their strengths rather than their weaknesses. None of them is without skills which you might need.”
Wiz thought about it for a minute and looked up at the big wizard.
“Do you really think they’ll help?”
“The point, Sparrow, is that worrying about them will not help either. A positive attitude can give you an advantage and I think you will need every one you can find.”
“All I wanted was a simple little scouting expedition, to probe around the edges a little.”
“Life does not always give us what we want,” Bal-Simba told him. “Very often we must choose to accept what it gives us with the best grace possible.”
###
“Isn’t the sun ever going to break through?” Wiz growled as he looked out the window of the castle’s great hall toward the west.
“Not today,” Bal-Simba said, looking over his friend’s shoulder.
It was afternoon, but the low clouds and deepening fog had made the day even dimmer than the dawn. The sullen gloom beyond the window reflected Wiz’s mood perfectly and that, he thought, was one thing he didn’t need right now.
Most of the rest of the party shared his mood. Not entirely, of course. Malkin was bouncing around like a fox terrier, happy at the prospect of action—not to mention slitting a few throats and perhaps lifting some purses. Glandurg struck a grimly heroic pose. Danny was just grim and June was, well, June.
Wiz kept looking out the window. “A blizzard coming on?”
“Perhaps. But I think something more than that.”
“What?”
“I do not know,” Bal-Simba said, “but I suspect we shall find out after you are gone.”
The way he said it indicated he didn’t think they’d like what they found.
Wiz turned away from the window. “Look, I know you don’t like this, but I have got to do what I can to save Moira.”
Bal-Simba continued to look out the window. “You must act according to your nature, Sparrow. Only consider what a victory it would be for the Enemy if something were to happen to you.”
Wiz bit his lip. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”
As he said it, he rubbed his right ring finger, bare for the first time in months. Like the others he was leaving his Ring of Protection behind. The spell, which froze the wearer into invulnerable immobility when facing a mortal threat, had not protected Moira. What’s more, Wiz’s experience in the Dragon Marches had proven that the spell could be used against the wearer by freezing that person through the simple expedient of keeping up the threat. Wiz knew the rings wouldn’t help on this expedition, but still . . .
Bal-Simba turned from the window. “The time draws near.”
The scouting party all wore traveling cloaks and each of them carried a pack. They were armed and armored, each in his or her appropriate fashion. For Wiz and Danny that meant their wizard’s staffs, since neither of them was proficient with this world’s weapons. Glandurg had a mail byrnie to his knobby knees and Blind Fury slung over his back. Malkin had a shirt of light mail and her rapier and dagger—plus who-knows-what concealed about her person. June had her knife.
Since they would be sending themselves along the Wizard’s Way rather than being sent there was no need to start from the great hall. However the cavernous hall had enough room for the people who had come to see them off, plus the dozen or so of the Mighty posted at strategic points around them in case something nasty tried to come in as they went out.
Among the others were Shauna, holding tight to a tearful Ian. And of course the dragon that was now the body of Wiz’s wife.
Moira stepped close and pressed her scaly lips to his. “Please be careful.”
Wiz manfully ignored the dragon breath and hugged her as best he could. “Hey, we’re only going for a look-see, remember?”
He looked around one last time. “Okay, I guess we’re ready.”
With that they took their places, close within the circle. Wiz raised his staff, gestured and spoke and with five small pops of displaced air they disappeared along the Wizards Way into the stronghold of the Enemy.
Six
Dungeon Redux
“backslash light exe.”
The darkness around them was replaced with a cold blue light and Wiz and the others got their first look at the dungeons beneath the City of Night.
For the others it was a first. Wiz had been in the multi-layered labyrinth beneath the city of the Dark League during the great magical battle that broke the League’s power forever.
Not that he recognized a thing. His only memories were of endless tunnels of dirt and stone separated by doors of oak and corroded iron, and strange furtive movements in the shadows. He hadn’t liked the place when he had been here then, he hadn’t liked it when a remnant of the Dark League had kidnapped him back to the now-ruined city a while later and he certainly didn’t like it now.
They were bunched together in a wide stone corridor apparently hewn from solid rock. The passage was wider and taller than any he remembered seeing in the dungeons and the walls were worked smooth instead of being left uneven and scarred with the marks of the hewers’ tools.
The place seems different,” he said, running his hand along the stone. “As if someone’s been working on it.”
“Probably,” Malkin said as she looked around appraisingly.
Glandurg kept his hand on the hilt of Blind Fury and sniffed the stale air in great wheezing breaths. June stayed close to Danny, her head swiveling this way and that. Clearly she didn’t like what she was seeing. That was all right, Wiz didn’t like what he saw either.
“Well, which way?” Malkin asked. She seemed as calm as if they were out for a stroll in the castle rose garden, but Wiz noticed her hand stayed near the cup hilt of her rapier.
Wiz consulted the amulet around his neck. The amulet looked like an ordinary lensatic compass. The first time he came here he had used a seeker globe that floated ahead to show him the way to where Moira was held captive. That had proved less than ideal when the globe blithely floated into a guardroom full of goblin warriors with Wiz and his party close behind. If the compass was more prosaic it was also not as likely to get them in trouble.
Danny lifted a similar device hung around his neck and turned this way and that. “No sign of hostile magic,” he said.
The one thing they didn’t have was a map. The magical forces around this place were too strong for the wizards of the North to get the lay of the land and there were no pre-existing maps of the place. Wiz suspected that even the wizards of the Dark League, who had delved this place, hadn’t had a complete map. He suspected even more strongly that the dungeons’ new tenant had done some major remodeling.
“Off in this direction.”
Then,” said Glandurg, striding to the front, “let us away.”
The dwarf took the lead with Malkin following, then Wiz, then June and then Danny. It wasn’t an ideal formation but it did mean that if Glandurg started swinging that sword the others would be
able to get clear.
The tunnel led slightly off to the right and down. Here and there the old dirt walls or rough stone showed through, as if whatever was working on the dungeons hadn’t finished yet. Wiz found the thought comforting and he tried to hold onto it.
Every hundred feet or so the tunnel would branch, sometimes into three or four directions. But the directional amulet kept pointing straight ahead. At last they came to a branching where the amulet told them to go right. Right through a large iron-bound door of age-darkened wood.
Malkin studied the door in the light of the magic globe. “No obvious lock,” she said more to herself than the others. She ran her fingers over the rough iron surface, pressing experimentally here and there.
Glandurg reached for his sword.
“With a single blow of Blind Fury I shall cleave it asunder.”
Danny and Wiz edged away from the door.
“Uh, we’re not to that stage yet,” Wiz said a trifle desperately. “Just keep watch, okay?”
Malkin nodded and bent before the door. She ran her hands over the lock plate like a pianist touching her instrument. She tapped on the door frame in two or three places and then turned her attention to the iron plate set in the stone to take the locks bolt.
“Easiest to take that off,” she muttered and produced a set of tools from somewhere about her person. “Bring that light over here will you?”
As Wiz moved to comply she began to work on the plate in the wall. It was held in place with three large and quite rusty nuts, he saw, with the bolt ends peened over them to prevent their removal. For some reason that bothered him, but he couldn’t quite understand why.
Malkin produced something that looked like a surgeon’s scalpel and applied it to the peened-over part of the bolts. The rusty iron cut like cheese under the pressure of the magical knife. Next she produced a small bottle and put several drops of an oily liquid on each bolt. The liquid seemed to soak into the joint between the nuts and bolts. Then she held up a tuning fork and struck it against the wall. A pure clear tone at the edge of human hearing filled the tunnel and Malkin applied the base of the fork to the first nut. There was a fine shifting of powder from the nut and bolt as the rust fell away under the influence of the vibrations.
She applied the tuning fork to each of the other bolts and then reached into the tool roll for something else. Then she stopped very deliberately, exhaled and stood up.
“Someone told me I shouldn’t rush these things,” she explained. “The next step is to remove those fasteners.”
“Then we take the plate off and open the door,” Danny said.
Malkin looked at him. “Then we see. Best not to anticipate what you’ll find on a job like this. Too much chance of missing something important.”
With that she turned back and knelt again before the iron plate. She took the first nut between her thumb and forefinger and carefully, delicately, turned it. The rusty nut came off as if it was on only finger tight.
While the others watched Malkin moved to the center nut. She grasped it, moved as if to turn it and then stopped dead. Then slowly, ever so slowly, she began to turn the nut the other way.
“That’s tightening it,” Danny said, but the nut backed off and fell into Malkin s hand. She shot Danny a raised-eyebrow look over her shoulder and went back to the third nut, which came off in the conventional direction.
Wiz picked up the second nut and looked at it. “A dummy thread,” he said. “The first few turns are cut right-handed, but the bearing threads are actually left-handed.”
By this time Malkin had the plate off and the door open and while Wiz looked at the nut the others started filing through.
“Come here and look at this,” Danny said from the other side of the door. Wiz followed him through. There, behind the now-open door was an evil-looking black sphere cradled like a nut in a nutcracker between a lever and the wall. One end of the lever was pivoted in place and the other end was fastened to the bolt with the backwards nut.
“Turn that thing the wrong way and you break the sphere,” Danny told him.
Suddenly Wiz felt very cold. “Nasty.”
“I wonder what’s in that sphere anyway?”
“Danny.”
“Yeah, Wiz?”
“Never ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to.”
“How did you know how to open that door?” Wiz asked as he caught up with Malkin at the head of the party.
“Wizard, your problem is you’re too trusting,” Malkin told him. “If it looks like it is supposed to open by turning deosil, then obviously it opens by turning widdershins.”
“Thanks,” Wiz mumbled and dropped back beside Danny, lost in thought.
“What’s wrong?” Danny asked.
“Malkin opened the door by turning the bolt clockwise.”
“Just the opposite of what you’d expect. It was a trap.”
“How many bolts have you seen since you got here with right-hand threads, like the ones in our world?”
The younger programmer stopped and looked at him. “I can’t remember seeing any bolts—except for the stuff we’ve made. Here they use pins or wedges.”
“Exactly. They don’t use bolts, right-hand or left-hand. But that door was gimmicked to trap someone who expected a right-handed thread. What we’d expect.”
“You mean this place is full of traps designed just for us?”
“Either that or the traps were designed by people who think like us. People from our world.”
Danny let out a low whistle. “Jeez, I don’t know which is worse.”
“Let me know when you decide,” Wiz told him. “Because chances are whichever one is worse, that’s the one it is.”
###
The evening came on dark and full of dirty fog. There was no sunset that day at the Wizards’ Keep, only the dank fog and the wind keening about the towers where lamps burned late as wizards labored over their spells. Here and there a guardsman paced the battlements, cloak drawn tight against the growing chill.
“What is the time?” Bal-Simba asked as he stared out the window, straining to make out the castle curtain wall.
Arianne glanced at the magic sundial sitting on her work table. “Barely the seventh day-tenth.” She paused. “Dark, is it not?”
“Too dark,” Bal-Simba agreed. “Unnaturally so, I think.”
Arianne’s eyes flicked to the window but saw only Bal-Simba’s reflection against the darkness. “Our enemy’s work?”
“Perhaps.” He turned from the window. “Ask Juvian to examine this fog for signs of magic.”
His assistant nodded and spoke into a communications crystal.
###
So cold, Shauna thought, even for winter. She picked up the wrought iron poker and stirred up the fire. Listen to yourself. Like someone’s old grandmother. Still she stirred the fire, seeking comfort from the renewed flames.
Normally the apartment in the guardsmens’ quarters was snug enough, with whitewashed walls and comfortable furniture enlivened with polished copper pots and examples of Shauna’s needlework. But tonight it seemed chill and dank, oppressed by the air that had settled over the Wizards’ Keep.
She returned to the high-backed bench and Ian and Caitlin pressed back against her, seeking their own comfort. This deep in the castle they could not hear the keen of the wind, but they felt it just the same.
As she settled her bulk onto the bench she sighed and the children pressed closer. She put an arm around each and pulled them closer yet.
Shauna was a guardsman’s daughter and a guardsman’s wife and she had lived through the evil days of the Dark League’s ascendancy when human magic was puny and the Council of the North had faced constant ruin at the hands of foes human and non-human. For all that, she could not remember a more bleak evening.
Malcolm, her husband, was eating soldier’s stew, taking the common meal in the guard room. Supper was done, the dishes washed and put away. Normally she would be ge
ntly hinting about bedtime by now, but no one was sleepy and, truth to tell, Shauna preferred their company.
“I wish daddy was here,” Caitlin said without raising her head.
“Your daddy’s got duty,” Shauna told her daughter, “special duty like half of ’em tonight.”
“I want my daddy, too,” Ian added.
She stroked the boy’s ash-blond hair. “Hush. It will be all right. You’ll see. The Sparrow and your daddy and mommy have gone off to fix everything.”
Neither child said anything, but both seemed to snuggle even closer.
For a bit they watched the flames in silence. “I wish Fluffy was here,” Ian said finally.
“You’ll see him soon enough,” she said. “Moira promised to stop by later.”
Ian looked up at her as if he would cry. “We can’t see Fluffy.”
“He’s not Fluffy anymore,” Caitlin explained sadly into her mother’s bosom. “He’s Moira.”
###
“You were right, My Lord,” the middle-aged man in the crystal sphere said to Bal-Simba. “The fog is not natural and it bears the mark of the Enemy’s magic.”
“Is it dangerous?” Bal-Simba asked Juvian’s image.
The wizard frowned until the lines of his forehead nearly matched the angle of his widow’s peak. “Not now. But there are stirrings within. Perhaps it builds toward something. Shall I attempt to disperse it?”
It was Bal-Simba’s turn to frown. “I think not yet. Make sure that we are protected against it and continue to watch it carefully. Meanwhile, prepare spells to disperse it if need be. And report any changes to me.”
“I shall, My Lord. I am not sure we can disperse it, but we will begin work on spells immediately. Merry part.”
“Merry meet again,” Bal-Simba replied and the image blinked out.
“On our very doorstep,” Arianne said over Bal-Simba’s shoulder.