Wizard’s Bane w-1

by Rick Cook

  Okay, the next step is a compare spell. In IF-THEN. For that I’ll need . . . Then he started as he realized how late it had gotten. He still hadn’t cut wood for the next day and it was almost time for dinner.

  For a moment the old fascination and new sense of responsibility warred in his breast. Then he reluctantly put down the board and started back to the keep. If I don’t show up soon someone is likely to come looking for me, he thought. Besides, they’ll need wood for tomorrow.

  No one seemed to notice his absence or made any comment when he disappeared the next day after his stint at the woodpile. The comparison spell also proved to be straightforward. The final step was the calling spell, the spell that would call other spells. That was the key, Wiz knew. If it worked he had the beginnings of his language.

  Again Wiz worked slowly and carefully, polishing his ideas until he was sure he had something that would work. It took nearly three days before he felt confident enough to try it.

  Once more he wrote a series of numbers on a clean slab of wood. Then he erased them. Then he readied the new spell.

  "Call remember," he commanded.

  There was a faint "pop" and a tiny figure appeared on the work bench. He was about a foot high with dark slick hair parted in the middle and a silly waxed mustache. He wore white duck trousers, a ruffled shirt and a black bow tie. Without looking at Wiz, he passed his hand over the board and once again the bits of charcoal rearranged themselves into the numbers Wiz had written. Then with another "pop" the figure disappeared.

  Wiz goggled. A demon! I just created a demon. Shiara had said that once a spell grew to a certain level of complexity it took the form of a demon but he had never expected to make one himself.

  He had never considered what a command would look like from within the computer. I never had to worry about that, he thought, bemused.

  This particular command looked darned familiar. Wiz didn’t know for sure, but he doubted that bow ties and waxed mustaches were worn anywhere on this world. After wracking his brains for a couple of minutes he remembered where he had seen the little man before. He was the cartoon character used to represent the interpreter in Starting Forth, Leo Brodie’s basic book on the Forth language.

  That made a crazy kind of sense, Wiz told himself. What he had just written functionally was very close to a Forth interpreter. And he was basing his language in part on Forth. Apparently the shape of a demon was influenced by the mental image the magician has of the process.

  I wonder if he speaks with a lisp?

  Then he sobered. More to the point, how could he be sure that his language’s commands would respond only to the explicit spells that defined them and not by some chance idea or mental image? Wiz made his way back to the castle in deep thought.

  It wasn’t at all as easy as that. The first thing Wiz discovered was that the universe was not orthogonal. The rules of magic were about as regular as the instruction set on a Z80. Some things worked in some combinations and not in others. Murphy said "constants aren’t" and Murphy was apparently one of the gods of this universe.

  He was uncomfortably aware that he didn’t really understand the rules of magic. He deliberately limited his language to the simplest, most robust spells, counting on the power of the compiler to execute many of them in rapid succession to give him his power. But even that turned out to be not so simple.

  There were some things which seemed to work and which were very useful, but which didn’t work consistently or wouldn’t work well when called from other spells. Wiz suspected the problem was that they were complex entities composed of several fundamental pieces. He deliberately left them out of the code. After all, he rationalized, this is only version 1.0. I can go back and add them later.

  He benchmarked his compiler at about 300 MOPS (Magical Operations Per Second). Not at all fast for someone used to working on a 3 MIPS (Million instructions per Second) workstation, but he wanted reliability, not speed. Besides, my benchmarks are for real, he told himself, not some vapor wafting out of the marketing department.

  There were other problems he hadn’t anticipated. Once he tried to write down a simple definition using a combination of mathematical notation and the runes of this world’s alphabet. He gave up when the characters started to glow blue and crawl off the board. After that he was careful never to put a full definition on a single piece of anything. He split his boards into strips and wrote parts of code on each board.

  The clean, spare structure of his original began to disappear under a profusion of error checking and warning messages. To keep side effects to a minimum he adopted a packaging approach, hiding as much information as possible in each module and minimizing interfaces.

  Wiz spent more and more time at the hut poring over his tablets and testing commands. Sometimes the mice would come out and watch him work at the rude plank bench under the window. Wiz took to eating his lunch in the hut and left crumbs for the mice. Winter was a hard time for the poor little things, he thought.

  Moira noticed the change in Wiz, but said nothing at first. Part of her was relieved that he was no longer constantly underfoot, but part of her missed the ego boost that had given her. Deep down there was a part of her which missed seeing Wiz constantly, she finally admitted to herself.

  If Shiara noticed, she said nothing. She and Wiz still talked magic, but now it was no longer an everyday occurrence.

  What Ugo noticed was anyone’s guess. Probably a great deal, but the goblin kept his counsel and grumbled about his chores as always.

  Like a small boy with a guilty secret, Wiz went well beyond Heart’s Ease for the first test of his new system. He found a sheltered glade surrounded on all sides by trees and bushes. There he set to work on his first real spell.

  There was a jay’s tail feather lying on the leaves, slate blue and barred with black. Wiz picked it up, held it by the quill and slowly and carefully recited his spell.

  Nothing happened. The spell had failed! Wiz sighed in disappointment and dropped the feather. But instead of fluttering to the ground, the feather rose. It rotated and twisted, but it ever so gently fell upward from his hand.

  Wiz watched transfixed as the feather wafted itself gently into the air.

  It wasn’t much of a spell, just enough to produce a gentle current of air which could barely be felt against the outstretched palm. But Wiz was elated by its success. He had actually commanded magic!

  They marked Mid-Winter’s Day with a feast and celebrations. Ugo cut a large log for the fire. They had mulled wine flavored with spices, nuts, dried fruits and delicacies. With the nuts, fruit and spices Moira whipped up what she called a Winter Bread. It reminded Wiz of a fruitcake.

  "In my country it is the custom to give gifts at this time of the year," Wiz told them. "So I have some things for you."

  Wiz was not very good with his hands, but from a long-ago summer at camp, he had dredged up the memory of how to whittle. He reached into his pouch and produced two packages, neatly tied in clean napkins for want of wrapping paper.

  "Lady," he said, holding the first one out to Shiara. She took it and untied the knot by feel, fumbling slightly as she folded back the cloth. Inside lay a wooden heart carved from dark sapwood, laboriously scraped smooth and polished with beeswax until it glowed softly. A leather thong threaded through a painstakingly bored hole provided a way to wear it.

  "Why, thank you Sparrow," Shiara said, running her fingertips over the surface of the wood.

  "This is for you," he said holding the second package out to Moira. Inside was a wooden chain ending in a wooden ball in a cage.

  "Thank you, Sparrow." Moira examined her present. Then her head snapped up "This is made from a single piece of wood," she said accusingly.

  Wiz nodded. "Yep."

  She stared at him gimlet-eyed. "Did you use magic to get the ball into the cage?"

  "Huh? No! I carved it in there." Briefly he explained how the trick was done.

  Moira softened. "Oh. I’m sorry, Sp
arrow. It’s just that when I see something like that I naturally think of magic."

  "It’s a good thing I didn’t make you a model ship in a bottle."

  "No," she said contritely. "I’m sorry for believing you had gone back on yur promise not to practice magic."

  "It’s all right," he mumbled uncomfortably.

  In spite of that, the holiday passed very well. For perhaps the first time since he had been summoned, Wiz enjoyed himself. Part of that was the holiday, part of it was that he now had real work to do and part of it—a big part of it—was that Moira seemed to be warming to him.

  Wiz was chopping wood the next morning when Ugo came out to see him. "More wood!" the goblin commanded, eyeing the pile Wiz had already chopped.

  "That’s plenty for one day," Wiz told him.

  "Not one day. Many day," the goblin said. "Big storm come soon. Need much, much wood."

  Wiz looked up and saw the sky was a clear luminous blue without a cloud in sight. The air was cold, but no colder than it had been.

  "Big storm. More wood!" Ugo repeated imperiously and went on his way.

  Well, thought Wiz, it’s his world. He turned back to the woodpile to lay in more.

  All day the sky stayed fair and the winds calm, but during the night a heavy gray blanket of clouds rolled in. Dawn was rosy and sullen with the sun blushing the mass of dirty gray clouds with pink. By mid-morning the temperature had dropped ominously and the wind had picked up. Ugo, Moira and Wiz all scurried about last-minute tasks.

  It started to snow that afternoon. Large white flakes swirled down out of the clouds, driven by an increasing wind. Thanks to the clouds and the weak winter sun, dusk came early. By full dark the wind was howling around Heart’s Ease, whistling down the chimneys and tugging at the shutters and roof slates.

  For three days and three nights the wind howled and the snow fell. The inhabitants warmed themselves with the wood Wiz had cut and amused themselves as they might in the pale grayish daylight that penetrated through the clouds and snow. They went to bed early and stayed abed late, for there was little else to do.

  Then on the fourth day the storm was gone. They awoke to find the air still and the sky a brilliant Kodachrome blue. Awakened by the bright light through the cracks in the shutters, Wiz jumped out of bed, ran to the window and threw the shutters wide.

  Below everything was white. The snow sparkled in the mild winter’s sun. Tree branches bore their load of white. Down in the courtyard of the keep, the outbuildings were shapeless mounds buried under the snowdrifts. The whole world looked clean and bright and new that morning from Wiz’s window.

  After a quick breakfast Wiz and Moira went outside.

  "It appears no damage was done," Moira said as she looked over the buildings in the compound. "The roofs all seem to be secure and the snow does not lie too heavily on them." Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were rosy with the cold, almost hiding her freckles. "We will have to shovel paths, of course."

  "Yeah, and make snowmen," Wiz said, sucking the cold crisp air deep into his lungs and exhaling in a huge cloud.

  Moira turned to him. "What is a snowman?"

  "You’ve never made a snowman?" Wiz asked in astonishment. "Hey, I’m a California boy, but even I know how to do that. Here, I’ll show you."

  Under Wiz’s instruction, they rolled the snow into three large balls and stacked them carefully. There was no coal, so stones had to serve as eyes and buttons, while Moira procured a carrot from the kitchen to act as the nose.

  "What does he do?" Moira asked when they finished building him.

  "Do?" said Wiz blankly.

  "Yes."

  "It doesn’t do anything. It’s just fun to make."

  "Oh," said Moira, somewhat disappointed. "I thought perhaps it came to life or something."

  "That’s not usually part of the game," Wiz told her remembering Frosty the Snowman. "It’s something done only for enjoyment."

  "I suppose I ought to do more things just for enjoyment," Moira sighed. "But there was never time, you see." She looked over at Wiz and smiled shyly. "Thank you for showing me how to make a snowman."

  "My pleasure," Wiz told her. Suddenly life was very, very good.

  He spent most of the rest of the day helping Ugo shovel paths through the drifts to reach the outbuildings. For part of the afternoon he cut firewood to replace the quantities that had been burned during the blizzard. But with that done, they were at loose ends again. The snow was still too deep to do much outside work and most of the inside work was completed. So Wiz suggested a walk in the woods to Moira.

  "If it’s not too dangerous, I mean."

  "It should not be. The storm probably affected all kinds of beings equally." She smiled. "So yes, Wiz, I would like to walk in the woods."

  They had to push through waist-high drifts to reach the gate, but once in the Wild Wood the going was easier. The trees had caught and held much of the snow, so there was only a few inches on the ground in the forest.

  Although the weak winter’s sun was bright in the sky it was really too cold for walking. But it was too beautiful to go back. The snow from the storm lay fresh and white and fluffy all around them. Here and there icicles glittered like diamonds on the bare branches of the trees. Occasionally they would find a line of tracks like hieroglyphics traced across the whiteness where some bird or animal had made its way through the new snow.

  "We had a song about walking in a winter wonderland," Wiz told Moira as they crunched their way along.

  "It is a lovely phrase," Moira said. "Did they have storms like this in your world?"

  "In some places worse," Wiz grinned. "But it never snowed in the place where I lived. People used to move there to get away from the snow."

  Moira looked around the clean whiteness and cathedral stillness of the Wild Wood. "I’m not sure I’d want to be away from snow forever," she said.

  "I had a friend who moved out from—well, from a place where it snowed a lot and I asked him if he moved because he didn’t like snow. You know what he told me? I like snow just fine, he said, it’s the slush I can’t stand."

  Moira chuckled, a wonderful bell-like sound. "There is that," she said.

  They had come into a clearing where the sun played brighter on the new snow. Wiz moved to a stump in the center and wiped the cap of snow off with the sleeve of his tunic.

  "Would my lady care to sit?" he asked, bowing low.

  Moira returned the bow with a curtsey and sat on the cleared stump. "You have your moments, Sparrow," she said, unconsciously echoing the words she had said to Shiara on their arrival at the castle.

  "I try, Lady," Wiz said lightly.

  Sitting there with her cheeks rosy from the cold and her hair hanging free she was beautiful, Wiz thought. So achingly beautiful. I haven’t felt this way about her since I first came to Heart’s Ease.

  "But not as hard as you used to." She smiled. "I like you the better for that."

  Wiz shrugged.

  "Tell me, where do you go when you disappear all day?"

  "I didn’t think you’d noticed," he said, embarrassed.

  "There have been one or two times when I have gone looking for you and you have been nowhere to be found."

  "Well, it’s kind of a secret."

  "Oh? A tryst with a wood nymph perhaps?" she said archly.

  "Nothing like that. I’ve been working on a project." He took a deep breath. It’s now or never, I guess.

  "Actually I’ve been working out some theories I have on magic. You see …"

  Moira’s mouth fell open. "Magic? You’ve been practicing magic?"

  "No, not really. I’ve been developing a spell-writing language, like those computer languages I told you about."

  "But you promised!" Moira said, aghast.

  "Yes, but I’ve got it pretty well worked out now. Look," he said, "I’ll show you." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the jay’s feather he had used in his experiment. "I’ll use a spell to make this
feather rise."

  "I want nothing to do with this!"

  "Just hold up a minute will you? I know I can make this work. I’ve been doing it in secret for weeks."

  "Weeks?" Moira screeched. "Fortuna! Haven’t you listened to anything you’ve been told since you got here?"

  "I’m telling you it works and I’ve been doing it for a long time," Wiz said heatedly. "You haven’t seen any ill effects have you? In fact you didn’t even know I was working magic until I told you."

  Moira let out an exasperated sigh. "Listen. It is possible, just possible, that you have been able to do parlor tricks without hurting anything. But that doesn’t make you a magician! The first time you try something bigger there’s going to be trouble."

  "I tell you I can control it."

  "Those words are carved on many an apprentice’s tomb."

  "All right. Here, give me your shawl."

  "No. I’m going to tell Shiara."

  "Moira, please."

  Dubiously, Moira got off the stump and unwound the roughly woven square of cloth she wore around her neck under her cloak.

  The shawl was bigger than anything Wiz had ever worked with, but he set it down on the stump confidently. Mentally he ran over the rising spell, making a couple of quick changes to adapt it for a heavier object. He muttered the alterations quickly and then thrust his hands upward dramatically.

  "Rise!" he commanded.

  The edges of the shawl rippled and stirred as a puff of air blew out from under the fabric. Then the cloth billowed and surged taut as the air pressure grew. Then the shawl leaped into the air borne on a stiff breeze rising from the stump. The wind began to gently ruffle Wiz’s hair as the air around the stump pushed in to replace what was forced aloft by the spell.

  "See," he said triumphantly. "I told you I could make it work."

  "Shut it off!" Moira’s green eyes were wide and her freckles stood out vividly against her suddenly pallid skin. "Please shut it off."

  The wind was stronger now, a stiff force against Wiz’s back. Wisps of snow and leaves on the forest floor began to stir and move toward the rising air. Even as Wiz started the spell and the wind rose even higher. Moira’s shawl was long gone in the the uprising gale.