The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted

by Rick Cook

  Now maybe he'll get tired and give up.

  Ralfnir hung motionless, wings beating and armored chest heaving. He cocked his head and considered the human in the blue bubble floating a few hundred feet away. Then he straightened his neck as if he had reached a decision.

  On the other hand, Wiz thought, maybe he won't.

  Slowly, methodically, the dragon began to stalk the human across the sky.

  If Ralfnir couldn't harm Wiz, he quickly discovered he could knock him around a lot. The dragon batted Wiz in his blue bubble from paw to paw and then lashed him with his tail. The force of the blow drove Wiz down to the earth. The spell bounced him back up again like a rubber ball and rattled Wiz's teeth, spell or no.

  Again and again blows from Ralfnir's tail hammered Wiz to the ground, and again and again he bounced back up. In effect Ralfnir dribbled Wiz the length of the meadow and back.

  His spell might have rendered Wiz immune from physical force, but it did nothing at all for his inner ear. Somewhere between the second and third dribble Wiz discovered a hitherto unknown predilection to airsickness.

  While he fought to keep his stomach in place Wiz realized he hadn't been as smart as he had thought. He couldn't even think straight in the middle of all the bouncing, much less cast spells. Perhaps worse, the protection field severely limited the kinds of spells he could cast at all. The best he had was a standoff and he had a suspicion that wouldn't last forever.

  It didn't. After bouncing Wiz off the terrain one last time the dragon lay back and regarded him briefly. A garbled bit of dragon speech formed in Wiz's mind and suddenly his bubble burst, leaving Wiz hanging unsupported and unprotected several hundred feet in the air.

  There was a brief, sickening drop as the world rushed toward him.

  backslash paracommander exe! Wiz cried and his fall slowed to an easy descent. Ralfnir, however, didn't. The dragon dived again on the now-helpless wizard, intent on finishing him before he reached the ground.

  Wiz sucked in his breath when he saw the dragon coming. Doesn't shooting a man in a parachute violate the Geneva Convention or something? He realized Ralfnir had probably never heard of the Geneva Convention and wouldn't abide by it if he had.

  Wiz watched the dragon bore in on him, looming ever larger in his vision. backslash uncommander.exe! he whispered and the spell released him, letting him fall free again. The sudden burst of speed confused Ralfnir and instead of nailing Wiz squarely, he passed several feet over Wiz's head. As the dragon spread his wings to brake and come around again he twisted his head over his shoulder and shot a quick burst of fire at Wiz. The shot was badly aimed and missed, but it came close enough to fill Wiz's nostrils with the reek of singed hair.

  Wiz was so intent on watching Ralfnir he almost forgot to reactivate the spell. He was only a few feet off the ground when he switched it back on and hit hard enough to drive him to his knees. He barely had time to grab his staff before the dragon was on him again.

  This time Ralfnir settled to the ground with two mighty wing beats that threw up so much dirt Wiz flinched away. Then slowly, ponderously, he waddled across the meadow to confront his adversary.

  A quick spell reduced the friction beneath the dragon to almost nothing, but the dragon simply glided on like a skater on ice. He nearly fell into the gaping pit that opened before him, but he hopped over with a quick half-flap of his wings. Tendrils of meadow grass tugged at his feet, but the dragon broke their grip without seeming to notice. Wiz used an illusion spell to fill the meadow with duplicates of himself. Ralfnir ignored them and came straight for the real Wiz.

  A basketball-sized meteor blazed out of the sky and struck the dragon squarely between the eyes. Ralfnir shook his head as if to dislodge a fly. An iceberg congealed around him and shattered instantly. Ralfnir plowed through the pile of ice shards and kept coming. Barely a dozen feet from Wiz he stopped, raised his head high over Wiz and looked down at him.

  Wiz felt as if he was suffocating. The dragon's glare seemed to press down on him like a rock on his chest. He felt his will, his magic and even his life draining away from him under the impact of those great yellow eyes.

  Gasping, Wiz managed to form one more word and the world went black and freezing cold.

  Ralfnir roared in rage and frustration as his prey disappeared in the rapidly expanding black cloud. He drew his head even higher and breathed a gout of flame at the spot where Wiz had been.

  The resulting fireball blew Ralfnir clear across the meadow. Technically it was a misfire since the carbon black and liquid oxygen Wiz's spell had dumped around him hadn't had time to mix fully. However, the result was impressive enough. The carbon was very finely divided, almost monomolecular, and the liquid oxygen not only propelled the carbon black outward in all directions, shutting out light, it also made a dandy oxidizer for the carbon fuel.

  Another part of the spell protected Wiz from the explosion. Ralfnir wasn't so lucky. He lay stunned for an instant where the blast had flung him. As he rolled to his feet Wiz saw he was moving slowly, as if in pain. But he sprang into the air as agilely as ever.

  This time the attack was purely magical. Again the dragon closed in on Wiz, beating and battering at him with magical blow after magical blow. Wiz was able to deflect some of them with his staff, but there were so many and they came so quickly he could not ward them all off. Under the inexorable pressure Wiz was beaten to his knees, waving his staff in one hand in an increasingly futile effort to protect himself. His chest constricted, his vision blurred and he gasped for breath, leaning on his staff to keep from falling. Ralfnir came ever closer, moving in for the final kill.

  There was a sound like machine-gun fire from the edge of the meadow, four quick sharp explosions.

  And Jerry was there.

  And Danny.

  And Moira was there.

  And Bal-Simba was there.

  As one the quartet raised their staffs and hurled death and destruction at the dragon bearing down on Wiz.

  If he'd had time to prepare Ralfnir might have had a chance. He was an old dragon and greatly skilled in magic. But he was in the midst of battle and he was focused on Wiz with a predator's intentness. He barely noticed the other humans before their spells hit him.

  Bal-Simba was quickest off the mark. A bolt of black lightning flew from his fingertips and wrapped itself around Ralfnir. The dragon was brought up short in mid-swoop as if he had been lassoed, and he jerked violently against the sooty black bonds drawing tighter and tighter around him. The more he struggled the more closely he was held. Before the others' spells could reach him he was already weakening and sinking toward the earth.

  Jerry's spell was an outgrowth of his speculations about the physical nature of dragons. It enclosed Ralfnir in a perfectly reflecting sphere that rapidly brought its contents to the black body temperature of a dragon. Of course, since there was no energy sink available in the sphere, the dragon died a heat death, which is sort of the thermodynamic equivalent of heat stroke.

  Moira wasn't fancy. She just threw the three worst death spells Wiz and his friends had taught her. She topped it off with the worst spell in the old magic she remembered from her days as a hedge witch—a spell guaranteed to give the victim a case of hives.

  Danny's spell was probably the most ingenious. It took all the random molecular motion in the dragon's body and pointed it in one way—toward the highest gravity potential. What was left of Ralfnir didn't just drop out of the sky, he hurtled with ever-increasing speed. In the space of a few hundred feet the dragon went from zero to Mach eight. Straight down.

  Where he hit, Ralfnir literally left a smoking hole in the ground.

  Wiz sagged against his staff and stared dumbly at the hole where the dragon had been. Then he stared at his friends coming across the meadow to him. Neither event registered very strongly.

  "You shouldn't have come," Wiz mumbled as Bal-Simba reached him slightly ahead of the others. "You weren't supposed to come. I didn't want you here. You'
ve ruined everything."

  He was still mumbling when Bal-Simba laid a huge hand on his shoulder. "Sparrow look at me," he commanded. Wiz met his eyes and his mouth dropped open. He shuddered, staggered and would have fallen if Bal-Simba had not taken his arm.

  "Wha . . . what . . . ?"

  "A geas," Bal-Simba said. "A magical compulsion. Laid on you, I have no doubt, by a certain dragon."

  Wiz's jaw dropped again. "Oh," he said. "So that's . . ." He didn't get a chance to finish. Moira was in his arms, kissing him and crying and all he wanted to do was hold her close forever and ever.

  "Hey, Wiz," Danny said after an appropriate interval.

  Wiz raised his face from Moira's mane of copper hair. "Thanks guys. I think you just saved my life."

  The giant wizard made a throw-away gesture. "It was a piece of pastry."

  "That's 'piece of cake,' " Danny corrected.

  "Whatever."

  "Come on love," Moira murmured in his ear, "let us leave this place.

  Wiz shook his head without taking his nose out of his wife's hair. "I can't just yet. There are a couple of loose ends I need to tie up here."

  Moira looked over Wiz's shoulder at Bal-Simba.

  "No geas," he told her. "Only a sense of responsibility."

  "Responsibility to whom?" Moira asked.

  "The town council," Wiz told her.

  "The town council?"

  "Yeah, I'm a consultant to them on dragon problems."

  "Sparrow," the giant black wizard rumbled, "I am almost afraid to ask what you have been doing."

  "Well," Wiz admitted, "it's kind of complicated."

  Bal-Simba eyed his friend. "Now I am afraid to ask."

  "I'll explain it to you when we get back to town," he said. "It's really not that bad." Then he stopped. "At least it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it's not dangerous." He stopped again. "Well, okay, there are these three thugs who were trying to kill me and a couple of people on the council who want my hide. And I guess Pieter, the guy in the cement overcoat who's standing in the town square, is going to come looking for me once he gets unfrozen. But it's really not that bad." He realized all four of his companions were staring at him, hard. "Honest," he finished lamely.

  "You had best tell us about it when we get back to town," Bal-Simba said.

  "Uh, I've got to make a kind of a detour first." Wiz looked over his shoulder at the trickle of smoke coming from the fresh crater in the sod. He took a deep breath.

  "Okay, now for the hard part."

  Twenty-six: Dragon Decisions

  History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club.

  —John W. Campbell

  Again Wiz Zumwalt faced the assembled dragons. This time he had arrived under his own power along the Wizard's Way. He had come alone, but Bal-Simba and the others were watching him closely.

  This meeting being called on short notice, there weren't as many dragons along the walls of the canyon as there had been the day before. But there were still a satisfying number.

  "Well," he said to the mass of monsters, "you've had your taste of the new magic. Satisfied?"

  "It was not a fair duel," one of the dragons complained. "You had help from others of your kind."

  "Not fair at all," Wiz agreed cheerfully. "But then you're not going to get a fair fight with a human. Don't you see? Humans cooperate. They work together naturally." He thought of the town council. "Maybe not always easily and not always well, but they manage to do it."

  He threw his head back to look up at the assembled dragons and raised his voice so his words echoed off the cliffs. "It won't be one dragon against one human. It will be one or a few dragons against every human in sight. And most of the time the humans will win with the new magic."

  There was a great shifting and slithering as the dragons absorbed the idea.

  "Then we should kill you all now," a voice rang harshly in his head.

  "You could try," he said levelly. "But there are many more humans than there are in this valley and a lot of them already have the new magic. Even if you got every human in the valley, others would replace them."

  More shifting and slithering.

  "What do you propose then?" a new voice asked.

  "Simple. You're going to make a treaty with the people in the valley. And this time you're going to abide by it." He turned round to face the mass of assembled dragons. "All of you."

  "And how shall we bind all dragonkind by our agreement?" a "voice" like an iron kettledrum asked.

  "That's your problem. Maybe the seniors could take turns patrolling the border. But you're going to solve it or in a few generations there won't be any dragons left in the Dragon Lands."

  He looked up at the assembled monsters. "Think it over," he said. Then he turned on his heel and left.

  It wasn't yet noon but the group was worn out by the time they returned to the house. They were too tired to walk so they took the Wizard's Way back and popped into the front hall just as Anna came up the stairs from the kitchen.

  She wasn't the least fazed by the apparition in her front hall. These were wizards, wizards did strange things, therefore anything wizards did was normal. She merely curtseyed.

  "Will there be anything you need, My Lord?" she said to Wiz. As usual Anna looked utterly charming in a brown work dress and dirty apron. There was a smear of soot on her cheek just below one china blue eye and blond curls peeked out from the kerchief that protected her hair.

  "No, nothing now, thank you," Wiz said. "There's ale in the keg in the kitchen isn't there? We'll probably be down there for a while."

  Anna curtseyed again. "I'll finish preparing the guest rooms, then, My Lord." With that she turned and hurried up the stairs, oblivious to Moira's eyes boring into her back.

  "Who," Moira demanded, "is she?"

  "That's Anna. She's my housekeeper."

  The red-haired witch fixed him with a fishy eye. "Your house had better be all she has been keeping, My Lord."

  In the event the explanation in the kitchen took somewhat longer than Wiz had anticipated. About three hours, in fact, by the time he answered all the questions, straightened out everyone's chronology, found out about Judith's troubles with the FBI, and gave Jerry and Danny a very detailed and highly technical explanation about exactly how to gimmick an Internet router.

  "What do you intend to do about this Pieter, the one you left in town square?" Bal-Simba asked when he finally ran down.

  "Well," Wiz said, "I don't suppose it would be really right to leave the little oinker frozen for all eternity." He sighed with genuine regret. "So I guess I'll have to take the spell off him."

  "I would suggest doing it the last thing ere we leave the town," Bal-Simba said. "Otherwise he will like as not try to attack you again."

  "Oh, I wasn't thinking of being around at all," Wiz said. "I figured I'd create a timer demon to unfreeze him after we've left."

  "Wise," Bal-Simba nodded.

  "I was thinking of having the demon unfreeze him—oh, I dunno, say at high noon on the next market day. The square should be nice and crowded about then."

  "That's nasty," Danny said. "I really like it."

  "You get that way when you play consultant," Wiz grinned back. "That and hanging around politicians." He snapped his fingers. "Speaking of which, I'd better get down there and set up the spell. Don't want to leave it to the last minute. Also I've got an errand to run at the town hall."

  Bal-Simba cocked an eyebrow. "More consulting?"

  "No," Wiz told him as he stood up from the table, "I've got to see a man about a house."

  Wiz's errand at the town hall took somewhat longer than he had expected. But not nearly as long as it would take in Cupertino, he thought as he pushed his front door open. The council may have had politics down to a blood sport but at least they hadn't invented lawyers yet. As part of his efforts to gum up the works Wiz had considered introducin
g them to the concept, but he had saved it as an emergency tactic if things really got dire. Common decency if nothing else, he thought. Llewllyn hadn't been in his office at the town hall and Wiz was just as glad.

  As he tugged the front door closed Malkin came up from the kitchen.

  "Where is everyone?" he asked as she reached his floor.

  "Oh they're around," she said breezily. "Your wife's down in the kitchen, 'helping' Anna."

  " 'Helping'?"

  "Allaying her suspicions about what you've been up to with her. The big black wizard is in the front parlor, along with one of your friends." She grinned. "They're supposed to be meditating, but every so often they get so deep in thought they start to snore. Your other friend is upstairs working at your desk. Says he's surfing, but there's not a wave to be seen."

  "That's just a figure of speech," Wiz told her. "What about you?"

  "Oh, I've got some errands to run." She paused. "Leaving, eh?"

  "Probably tomorrow. I'm done here."

  She nodded. "That's the way of it."

  There was a longer pause.

  "What about you? What are you going to do once I've left?"

  Malkin laughed. "Oh, I'll go back to the Bog Side, away from all these high-toned folk like the town council and their fancy ways. I'll be taking the air, as you might say. You've stirred up a right hornet's nest here and I'm minded to see how it goes on for a bit."

  "I mean, you'll be all right and everything?"

  Malkin laughed again and Wiz thought it sounded a bit brittle.

  "Me? Fortuna, I've looked out for meself all these years. I'll do just fine on my own. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got an errand to run." She loped up the stairs toward her room.

  "Malkin."

  The tall thief paused at the top of the stairs and looked back. "Yes?"