The Wiz Biz

by Rick Cook

  Aelric waved a languid hand. “That is as it may be. The Sparrow seemed to feel he could turn this human tide before it came to that.” Then he sobered and power seemed to radiate out of him like a nimbus. “But I tell you this, Wizard. If you cannot find your Sparrow—and soon—then you may have lost your only chance to forestall a war which would rend the World asunder.” He nodded gravely. “Merry part.”

  Bal-Simba’s eyes widened at the usage, but he nodded in reply. “Merry meet again.” And the elf duke’s image was gone.

  Bal-Simba heaved a great sigh. “When an elf uses human courtesies you know you are in trouble,” he remarked to no one in particular. Then the giant black wizard turned to the gaping Watchers in the pit.

  “I want every Watcher we have scanning the World for our Sparrow.” He turned to Arianne. “Set up a schedule so we may search day and night.” Then to one of the wizards with a communication crystal: “Send the word out to all the villages and habitations at once. Wiz must be found. And order the dragon cavalry out to search as well.”

  “Lord, do you think he meant what he said about war?” Arianne asked.

  “Have you ever known an elf to joke?” Bal-Simba said. “He was concerned enough to come to us. That is more than sufficient proof that something very dangerous is in the air.”

  ###

  “Jerry, I think you’d better look at this.”

  Judith was standing at the entrance to Jerry’s stall with an odd look on her face.

  “We got the voting module working and, well, I think you’d better see the result.”

  Jerry followed her over to her own stall where Karl was looking bemused at three small demons standing together on the table.

  “We know that any spell above a certain level of complexity generates a demon as its physical manifestation,” Judith explained. “So we expected this thing would produce demons. But watch what happens when we feed it correct code.

  “emac” An Emac popped up on the desk next to the trio of demons.

  “backslash test1 exe” Judith said and the Emac gabbled at the demons. The demons stood motionless and then the one on the left hummed.

  “Okayyy,” it sang in a vibrant bass.

  “Okayyy,” the middle one chimed in a rich baritone.

  “Okayyyy,” said the third demon in a fine clear tenor.

  “Okaayyyyyy,” the three demon voices blended in perfect harmony. Then the sound died away and they fell silent.

  For a moment none of the programmers said anything.

  “The question is, is that a bug or a feature?” Karl asked.

  “I guess that depends on how you feel about music,” Jerry said. “Anyway, we don’t have time to fix it, so we’ll call it a feature.”

  Judith looted at the demons and shook her head. “I’m glad we didn’t build four processors. I’m not sure I could take a barbershop quartet.”

  “I don’t think you’d get a barbershop quartet,” Jerry said judiciously. “A gospel group seems more likely.”

  “Worse.”

  ###

  By nature and training, Danny needed a lot of time to himself. It had always been his refuge in times of trouble and his joy in times of special happiness.

  The castle was too crowded for him to be really alone. But he had found a place on the rooftops where he could look down on the Bull Pen and the courtyards. From here he was hidden from view by any of the wizard’s towers and could see out beyond the Wizard’s Lodge, over the tile and slate rooftops of the town and off into the rolling blue distance.

  Nearly every morning before he settled down to work, Danny would climb the narrow stairs to the attic and then go up the wooden ladder and out through the trap door that took him to his favorite place on the roof. He was not experienced enough in the ways of this World to know that the scuffmarks on the slates meant someone else came here too.

  Today, Danny had changed his pattern. It was late afternoon, normally a time when he would be settled in the Bull Pen and hard at work. But today his code had turned to shit and Cindy Naismith got on his case for something he said. So he left and came back up here for a while.

  He wouldn’t be missed, he knew. Not for some little time. Programmers set their own hours and besides, the rest of the team didn’t like him very much.

  Well, fuck ’em. That wasn’t anything new to Danny. Besides, he told himself, it wasn’t like he was goofing off. He was still thinking about the problem, and he needed to clear his head, didn’t he?

  There was a soft scrabbling noise on the slate roof behind him.

  Danny turned and there was a thin brown-haired girl with enormous doe eyes.

  “Hi,” Danny said, half-resenting the interruption. The girl moved back up the roof, away from him. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” The girl froze. “You okay?”

  No response. If he moved toward her she would have fled, but he kept his place. She sat down on the roof behind and above him and looked out over the city.

  Well, if she didn’t want to talk . . . Danny turned back to watch the clouds himself. It wasn’t as good as being completely alone, but it wasn’t bad either.

  Danny had taken to computers as a way to shut out the endless arguments that raged through his home. Later, after the divorce, the computer had become a way out of the loneliness, a friend who never turned its back on you or put you down.

  At first he hadn’t cared for programming, just racking up scores on video games. He had taken out his frustrations destroying aliens and monsters by the thousands and scoring points by the millions. Then he found out you could gimmick some of the games by editing character files. From that it was one small step to cracking copy protection to get games he couldn’t afford to buy and one thing led to another. By the time he was sixteen, Danny was a very competent, if unsystematic, programmer.

  He was also very, very lonely.

  Now here he was in a world something like the one those games were based on. Full of monsters and where magic worked. And he was still just as alone and just as cut off as he ever had been. Well, fuck ’em. He’d get by, just like he always had.

  Without thinking, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sandwich he had stashed there—smoked meat and sharp cheese on a long roll. Danny heard the girl shift on the roof behind him.

  “Want some?” She obviously did, but she was afraid to approach him.

  “Here.” He broke off half the sandwich and held it out to her. She looked at him intently but didn’t move. He considered tossing the sandwich up to her, but realized it would probably come apart in the air. He settled for reaching back and stretching out his hand.

  “Come on, I won’t hurt you.”

  Slowly, cautiously, the girl crept down the roof toward him. Finally, she was close enough to stretch out and snatch the sandwich from him. Then she scrabbled quickly back up the roof. The entire performance reminded Danny feeding a particularly shy squirrel.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “June,” the girl said around a mouthful of sandwich. “I am June.”

  ###

  “This is just like being at fighter practice.”

  Karl, Judith and several of the other team members were sitting on a low wall by the drill field watching the guardsmen practice. Under the arches of the colonnade Jerry was sitting on a bench watching girls.

  Just then a flight of dragon cavalry swept over the castle.

  “Okay,” Karl amended, “it’s almost like being at fighter practice.”

  Out on the field, Donal was practicing spear work against multiple opponents.

  “Tricky move with the spear,” Karl said to no one in particular as Donal dodged and spun between two opposing swordsmen.

  “Why does he keep the butt low like that?” Judith asked.

  “He is trying to keep the point directed at his opponent’s eyes,” a guardsman who was lounging nearby said. “That makes it hard to judge the length of the spear.”

  Karl nodded. “And it
sets him up to make a quick jab to the face, which will make almost anyone flinch.”

  The guardsman, a sandy-haired older man, looked closely at Karl. “You sound as if you know something of the art, My Lord.”

  “I’m a fighter. Well, an SCA fighter,” he amended quickly. “We used to fight with rattan weapons. For sport.”

  “Would not your magic gain you more than weapons skill in war?”

  “We don’t use swords and spears in war anymore,” Karl told him. “No, we do it strictly for fun.”

  The guardsman’s seamed face crinkled into a frown. “A most peculiar sport, if you do not mind my saying so, Lord.”

  “That’s what a lot of people in my world thought,” Karl sighed. “By the way, I’m Karl Dershowitz.” He extended his hand and the other man clasped it.

  “I am called Shamus MacMurragh. I command the guardsmen of the castle.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Tell me,” Shamus said, “how does our weapons play compare to your world?”

  “Very well. We do some things a lot differently and I think we’ve spent more time on the theory than you have, but on the whole you compare very well with our methods.”

  “I am very glad to hear it, My Lord,” Shamus said mildly. “Could you perhaps show us how you do these things?”

  Karl wasn’t quite sure, but he suspected he had just been trapped. “Be glad to,” he said with a casualness he did not feel.

  It took a few minutes to outfit Karl in the padded cloth hauberk, greaves, vambraces and helm the guardsmen used for practice. The shield they brought him was a target somewhat over two feet in diameter. Karl, whose SCA fighting style depended in large part on using the points of a heater shield, felt he was at a disadvantage, but he didn’t say anything.

  The sword they gave him was wood, not rattan, and a good deal heavier than what Karl was used to. Still, the balance was very good and it moved comfortably as he took practice swings.

  “Remember to pull your blows, Lord,” Shamus said as they faced off. “I do not want to be injured.”

  Karl nodded and licked his lips. Shamus moved with a catlike grace that suggested the guardsman wasn’t the one who should be worried.

  Karl came in in his standard fighting stance, shield in front, sword hilt over his head with the blade forward and down, resting on his shield.

  Shamus looked at him quizzically for a moment and then stepped in with two cuts to the head. Karl was strong, but his wrist could not absorb or stop the blows. His blade was knocked casually aside and Shamus’s sword rang off his helmet. Karl staggered back and nearly dropped the sword.

  Shamus grasped his elbow to help support him. “Are you all right, My Lord?”

  “Yeah, fine. Uh, in our system if you hit the other guy’s sword, the blow is considered blocked.”

  “Matters are somewhat different in our world,” Shamus said dryly. “But tell me, how can you strike anyone with your sword in that position?”

  “You mean down in front of the head like that? Easy. You twist your hips, drive your elbow down and throw the forearm out.” He demonstrated. “Like that.”

  “Interesting, but is it strong enough?”

  “Well, I can make someone’s helm ring pretty good with it.”

  “Try it on the pell,” Shamus invited.

  At the far end of the drill field was a row of head-high posts set in the earth. Each was about six inches thick and the dirt around them was freshly dug.

  Karl stepped up to the nearest post, assumed his position and struck, overhead and slanting down and into the post. The blade turned in his hand, so the first cut only skimmed the post, scraping along the surface and taking a shaving with it. The second cut drove the sword edge perhaps two inches into the pine.

  “Surprisingly strong, My Lord,” Shamus commented as Karl stepped back, massaging his wrist from the shock. Then he stepped up, assumed his guard stance and sheared the post off cleanly with a single mighty swing.

  “Such blows win battles,” he said, stepping back.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Years of practice,” Shamus said with a smile. “Of course there are one or two small tricks. But mostly an hour or two practice every day for, oh, six or seven years and you would be a creditable swordsman.” He laughed and clapped the younger man on the shoulder.

  “I think I just made a raging fool of myself,” Karl muttered to Judith as he came off the field.

  “I think it’s called hubris,” Judith told him. “How’s your head?”

  Karl rubbed his wrist. “It’s my arm more, than any my head and it will heal quicker than my pride.” He looked back out at the practicing guardsmen. “You know what the worst of it is? I can’t use any of this stuff in our combat back home. Our rules are so unrealistic that the techniques that really work won’t work for us.”

  ###

  “. . . so anyway, we’re working on a user interface. It’s going to be really neat when we get it done.”

  June watched Danny and said nothing.

  They sat side-by-side on the roof, looking out over the Capital to where the late afternoon sun turned puffy clouds into a symphony of pale golds and blush pinks.

  They had met up on the roof nearly every day since their first encounter. Sometimes one or both of them brought food and they had an impromptu picnic. Sometimes they just sat and talked. Or rather Danny talked and June listened. June hadn’t said a dozen words since that first day, but now they sat together on the slates. Sometimes they held hands.

  “You ought to come and see the place sometime. It’s really pretty interesting.”

  June smiled and shook her head.

  “Well, look, I gotta get down there or they’re gonna start asking questions. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  Danny started to rise, but June took hold of his arm and pulled him close. She kissed him full on the mouth and before Danny could respond she skittered away over the roof ridge.

  Danny sat there for a moment longer, tasting her on his lips and trying to understand what had happened. One thing he was sure of. He liked it.

  ###

  Even by the standards of the City of Night, this place was strange. The windows about the tower gave good light, else he never would have dared to approach the eerie blue glow issuing through the open doorway.

  At this level the tower was divided into two rooms. The one beyond the carved black portal must be by far the larger, but the one was substantial as well. Looking at the layout, Wiz had the odd feeling that this level was larger inside than it was on the outside.

  This was obviously a wizard’s tower and judging by the effects a very powerful wizard at that. Through the inner door, Wiz could see forms writhing in the smoky red dark. It might just be fumes from the ever-burning braziers, but he had no intention of crossing the threshold to find out.

  This room must have been an adjunct to the workroom. There were shelves along one wall which had obviously held scrolls. Pegs and hooks on another wall had perhaps held ceremonial robes and other magical apparatus.

  But none of that was left. The small room had been thoroughly ransacked. Hangings had been pulled off the walls and lay rotting in a heap on the floor. The shelves were empty and broken. The floor was littered with broken glass, smashed crockery and bits of less savory items that might once have been in pots and jars. In one comer an armoire leaned crazily against the wall, its doors torn half off their hinges and showing the scars where someone had hastily chopped them open.

  Wiz walked over to the cabinet and looked inside. The shelves were askew and the drawers were ripped apart. Like the room itself the armoire had been looted.

  On an impulse, he stuck his hand into the cabinet. He struck the back much sooner than he expected and jammed his fingers painfully.

  That wasn’t right, he thought as he flexed the aching digits. The back was closer than it should be. He put his hand back in the cabinet and reached around to feel the back from the outsid
e. Yes, there was definitely a space there. There was a good eight-inch difference between the inside and outside back.

  A careful examination of the inside back and the sides showed him nothing. The wood was plain and the grain straight and simple. He pressed and twisted, but the back remained in place.

  Well, he thought hefting his halberd, there’s always the field engineering approach.

  Three quick blows from the halberd splintered the thin wood of the back. On the third blow the armoire gave a despairing sproing and the remains of the back fell toward him. Eagerly Wiz reached inside.

  At first he thought the compartment was empty. But when he thrust his hand into the dark recess, his fingers touched cloth. He lifted the garment off the peg on the side of the recess and brought it out into the light.

  It wasn’t much, just a brown wool travelling cloak, frayed and slightly moth-eaten. The kind of thing a wizard might wear for a disguise, or because he was too engrossed in his magic to worry about appearances. It doesn’t even look very warm, Wiz thought as he fingered the thin cloth. For the hundredth time, Wiz thought of the fine gray and red cloak with the fur trim he had left in the village.

  Well, anything was better than nothing and that’s what I’ve got now. He threw the cloak over his shoulders and pulled it tightly about him. He was right, it wasn’t very warm. Still it was comforting to have something to wrap around himself.

  ###

  “I saw Moira today, My Lord,” Arianne said as she and Bal-Simba finished the day’s business in his study. “She asked if there was any news of Wiz.”

  “If there was news, she would be the first to know,” the giant wizard told his deputy. “No, so far our search has turned up nothing.” He frowned. “We know an accident did not befall him in the Wild Wood. If he started out on the Wizard’s Way and did not return to the Capital, we may assume some magical agency intervened.”