The Wiz Biz (44 page)

Wiz hefted it dubiously. He knew nothing about halberd fighting and this one was broken, useless for its original purpose. But it could still serve as a tool to pry open chests and boxes. Perhaps with it he would have a better chance of finding food.

Clutching his prize, Wiz crept back out into the corridor.

###

“Wiz kept notes on how his spell compiler worked,” Moira explained to the gaggle of programmers who followed her into her apartment the next morning. “He did most of that here rather than in his workroom. I think it would be best if you removed them yourselves, lest I miss something.”

“Thanks,” Jerry said as he went over to the desk, “we’ll get some boxes and . . .”

Then he saw the dragon sitting on top of the leatherbound book. A small, but very alert and obviously upset dragon. The dragon hissed and Jerry realized he, Karl and Moira were suddenly two paces ahead of everyone else in the group.

“What’s that?”

“That is the demon guardian Wiz created to protect his spells, especially the book holding most of his secrets. He called it the Dragon Book,” Moira explained.

Karl looked at Moira, Jerry looked at Karl and the dragon eyed them both.

“That
had
to be deliberate,” Karl said finally.

Jerry made a face as if he had bitten into something sour. “Believe me, it was.”

“Crave pardon?”

“There’s a standard text on writing compilers called the dragon book,” Jerry explained. “It’s got a picture of a dragon on the cover. A red dragon.”

“It was orange on my edition.”

“As protection of the contents?” Moira asked.

“More like a warning of what the course is like. It’s a real bear.”

“Then why not put a bear on the cover?”

“Bears aren’t red,” Karl put in before Jerry could answer. “They’re not orange either.”

Moira frowned. “Oh,” she said in a small voice.

“Anyway, how do we get rid of him?”

“Easily enough. Wiz taught me the dismissal spell.” She stepped to the edge of the desk and spoke to the demon.

“puff at ease exe

The dragon crawled off the book and retired to the corner of the desk.

“That is a spell in Wiz’s magic language,” she explained, turning back to the programmers. “The word
exe
is the command to start the spell,
at ease
is the spell and
puff
is the name of this demon.”

“Well, it is a
magic
dragon,” Karl said. A couple of the programmers groaned and Jerry winced again.

“Okay,” Jerry said. “We’ll
get this stuff out of your way and moved to our office as soon as possible. Uh, do you know where we are going to be?”

“The under-seneschal is waiting to show you to your workrooms,” Moira said. “He is in the courtyard, I believe.”

“Great. Let’s go then.” Everyone moved back toward the door, except Danny Gavin who was lounging in a chair.

“Are you coming?” Jerry asked.

“No, I think I’ll stay here,” Danny said. “Unless you need me?”

Jerry looked at Moira and Moira shrugged.

“Just don’t wander off.”

Almost as soon as the door was closed Danny was out of his chair and over to the Dragon Book. The guardian demon raised its head when he opened it but made no protest.

Now let’s see what this magic stuff is like.
Danny scanned the first few pages quickly, picking up the basics of the syntax as he went. Then he flipped further back and looked at a few of the commands.

Shit, this is a piece of cake.
He went back and reread the first part of the book more carefully, already mentally framing his first spell.

###

“We had to prepare workspace for you on short notice,” the under-seneschal said apologetically as he led the group across another courtyard. “I’m afraid all the towers are taken and Lord Bal-Simba doubted you would prefer caves. So to give you a place where you can all work together, we ah, well, we cleaned out an existing building.”

He was a small, fussy man who seemed to bob as he walked and kept rubbing his hands together nervously. He had been given an impossible job on very short notice and he was very much afraid his solution would insult some very important people. As they moved across the courtyard he became more and more nervous.

“We weren’t expecting so many of you, you see and we are so terribly crowded here . . .” His voice trailed off as they approached the building.

It was sturdily built of stone below and timber above. As they drew nearer, a distinctive aroma gave a hint of its original purpose and once they stepped through the large double doors there was no doubt at all as to what it was.

“A stable?” Jerry said dubiously.

“Well, ah, a cow barn actually,” the man almost cringed as he said it.

“Wonderful,” Cindy said, “back in the bullpen.”

“Oh, wow, man,” said one of the group, a graying man with his hair pulled back into a pony tail, “like rustic.”

“Hell, I’ve worked in worse,” one of the programmers said as he looked around. “I used to be at Boeing.”

###

The room was good-sized, but as cold as every other place in the City of Night. A mullioned window, its tracery in ruins, let in the sharp outside air. Piles of sodden trash and pieces of broken furniture lay here and there. On one wall stood a tall black cabinet, tilting on a broken leg but its doors still shut.

Wiz came into the room eagerly. Maybe there was something in the closed cabinet he could use.

Cold and hunger dulled his caution and he was halfway across the room before a skittering sound behind him told him he had made a mistake.

Wiz whirled at the sound, but it was too late. There, blocking the only way out, was a giant black rat. It was perhaps five feet long in the body and its shoulder reached to Wiz’s waist. Its beady eyes glared at Wiz. It lifted its muzzle to sniff the human, showing long yellow teeth. Wiz stepped back again and the rat sniffed once more, whiskers quivering.

Wiz licked his lips and took a firmer grip on the broken halberd shaft. The rat eyed him hungrily and moved all the way into the room, its naked tail still trailing out into the corridor.

Wiz stepped to one side, hoping the rat would follow and leave him room for a dash to the door. But the rat wasn’t fooled. It lowered its head and squealed like a piglet caught in a fence. Then it charged.

In spite of his disinclination to exercise, Wiz had naturally fast reflexes. Moreover, his two years in the World had hardened his muscles and increased his wind. He was far from being the self-described “pencil-necked geek” he had been when he had arrived here, but he was even further from being a warrior.

The monster closed in squealing. Wiz swung wildly with his rusty axe. The giant rat ducked under the blade and leaped for his throat.

Against a halfway-competent swordsman, the tactic would have worked. But Wiz wasn’t even halfway competent. He had swung blindly and he brought his weapon back equally blindly, backhand along the same path.

The spike on the back of the axe caught the rat just below the ear. Any guardsman on the drill field would have winced at such a puny blow, but the spike concentrated the force on a single spot. Wiz felt a “crunch” as the spike penetrated bone. The rat squealed, jerked convulsively and fell in a twitching heap at Wiz’s feet.

Wiz’s first instinct was to turn and run. But he checked himself.
Think,
he told himself sternly.
You’ve got to think.
Running wouldn’t solve anything. There was nowhere to run to and running burned calories he could ill-afford to lose. Panic wouldn’t get him the food he so desperately needed.

Well,
he thought, looking down at the gray-furred corpse,
maybe I can use one problem to solve another.
Kneeling over the body, he set to work with his halberd.

Wiz emerged from the room a while later wiping his mouth on a bit of more or less clean rag.

Rat sashimi, Wiz decided, wasn’t half-bad—if you used lots of wasabi. He didn’t have any wasabi, but it still wasn’t half-bad.

###

While the rest of the team broke for lunch, Jerry, Karl and Moira went back to the apartment to start sorting through Wiz’s papers.

“A barn!” Moira said angrily. “I cannot believe they would do that to you.”

“Hey, it’s dry and it looks like it can be made fairly comfortable,” Karl said. “Besides, it’s already divided up into cubicles.”

“Well, I can assure you, My Lords . . .” Moira began as she started to open the door.

There was a low moan and the sound of scuffling from the apartment. Moira threw open the door.

“Danny!” Jerry yelled.

The young programmer was rocking back and forth, his body slamming first forward almost to the desk and then back so forcefully the chair teetered.

“Something’s wrong! He’s having a stroke or something.”

“Stay away from him!” Moira ordered. “He is caught in a spell.”

“Stop it.”

“I do not know how. The command should be in the book.”

Jerry edged around the still-thrashing Danny and hooked the Dragon Book off the desk. The dragon demon ignored him, watching Danny the way a cat watches a new and particularly interesting toy.

“Damn, no index!”

“Try the table of contents,” Karl suggested.

“No table of contents, either!” He paged frantically through the book and muttered something about hackers under his breath.

“Here it is.” He read hurriedly,
“reset”
he commanded.

Danny continued to jerk back and forward.

“Exe
, My Lord,” Moira said frantically. “You must end with
exe
.”

“Oh, right.
reset exe
”

Suddenly Danny flopped forward and hit the table with a thump.

Moira and Jerry gently raised him up and leaned him back in the chair.

“Are you okay?” Jerry asked as the teenaged programmer gasped for breath.

“ ’S alright,” he slurred as he lifted his head off his chest. “I’ll be alright.” Jerry saw he was white and shaking but he was breathing more normally. “What happened?” Danny mumbled.

Moira pressed a cup of wine into his hands. “You were entrapped by the spell you created, My Lord,” she told him. “The spell repeated endlessly and you could not get out.”

“In other words, you were stuck in a DO loop,” Jerry explained.

Danny raised the cup in both hands and drained it in a gulp.

“Jesus. I was in there and it started and it just kept going over and over. Like a live wire you can’t let go.” He lowered the cup and it slipped from his numbed grasp to clatter on the table. “Jesus!”

“Tell us what happened.”

“Well, I was flipping through the manual and I figured I’d try it out. So I set up a simple little hack, only when it started it just kept going. I didn’t think I’d ever get out.”

“That was a dumb-ass stunt,” Jerry told him. “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know?” Danny snapped. “I didn’t think—”

“You sure as hell didn’t,” Jerry cut him off. “And you’d better start thinking before you do a damn fool thing like that again!”

Danny muttered something but Jerry ignored him.

“Okay,” Jerry said. “From now on nobody practices this stuff alone.”

###

Wiz was feeling almost jaunty as he made his way up the street with the broken halberd over his shoulder. He was still cold, but on a day as bright as this he could almost ignore that. Besides, the cold was easier to bear when you weren’t hungry all the time.

The halberd made a big difference in Wiz’s standard of living. There turned out to be a lot more food left in the City of Night than he had realized. But almost all of what remained was locked behind doors or in cupboards or chests. In the last few days he had gotten very good at using the halberd’s axe blade and the heavy spike behind to pry, chop and smash things open. Finding food was a full-time job, but it wasn’t quite the hopeless one it had been.

Today, he was well-fed on magically preserved meat and bread so dry and bricklike he had to soak it in water before he could eat it. The meat had an odd taste and the water he soaked the bread in hadn’t been very clean, but his stomach was still pleasantly full.

And now this neighborhood looked promising. The street was lined with smaller buildings, two and three stories. A number of small buildings, shops or houses, were more likely to yield food than a few big ones. Best of all, the doors and window shutters on nearly every house on the street were intact. That meant they had not been systematically looted and larger scavengers had been kept out.

The weather added to his mood. There was not a trace of the clouds that usually hung low and gray over the Southern Lands. The only thing in the pale-blue sky was the sun and it was almost at its zenith. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in it, but there was a certain amount of cheer.

A motion above the buildings caught his eye. Wiz turned his head just in time to see a black-robed wizard drift lazily over the rooftops. The man’s robe fluttered about his ankles and his head moved constantly as he scanned the city.

Wiz shrank back against the wall. But he knew he stood out sharply against the dark volcanic rock of the street and buildings. There wasn’t even a shadow to hide in and the wizard was floating in his direction. He was as exposed as an ant on a griddle and he would be fried like one as soon as the wizard spotted him.

Wiz bit his lip and silently cursed the bright sun and the shuttered houses. He looked up and down the street frantically, but there was not an open door or window to be seen.

There was a storm sewer opposite. It didn’t look big enough to take him and it was covered with an iron grate, but it was the only chance he had. Wiz dashed across the street and levered up the grate with a quick jerk of his halberd. Then, heedless of how deep the hole might be, he thrust himself through.

It was perhaps eight feet from the street to the trickle of freezing slime that ran through the bottom of the sewer. The shock and the slippery bottom forced him to his hands and knees before he regained his balance. He looked up just in time to see the wizard float down the street housetop high.