by Scott Meyer
Gary and Tyler nodded at Brit, turned to each other, and Tyler said, “It was your idea. You do the honors.”
Gary smiled, thanked him, and then ran around so that he faced the dragon head-on. “I got the idea from a kung fu movie I once saw.”
Gary hunkered down a bit, extended his left arm to his side, and curled his right arm inward, as if he intended to throw a Frisbee. He said, “Krei flying guillotine.”
A ring about a foot in diameter appeared in his right hand. He threw the ring toward the dragon’s head. It flew gracefully, growing in midair as it went. A thin line of glowing energy extended from the ring back to Gary’s hand. The ring dropped over the dragon’s head and slid down its neck, resting at its shoulder blades. Gary hauled back with his hand, as if pulling on the glowing line that tethered him to the ring. The glowing ring became a glowing disk, then disappeared as the dragon’s head and neck fell away from its body.
The head thrashed and lolled on the ground for several seconds. Then it continued for several more seconds. When nearly thirty seconds had passed with the head and severed neck still thrashing around, Roy said, “This isn’t going to stop, is it?”
“No,” Phillip said.
The dragon’s body continued to stand around, fidgeting in a bored sort of manner, with a large hole where its head used to be. The body took a small step forward and accidentally kicked the head, which breathed a plume of fire at its own former body. The fire washed over the body’s legs and belly without it seeming to notice at all.
Phillip shouted, “All right. They get the idea.”
Tyler shouted, “Krei duono ringego gooooal!” The arch with the semi-transparent blue membrane reappeared.
Gary grabbed the head and neck and held it close to his body, as if hugging it. The head swung wildly, like the nozzle of a fire hose at full pressure, shooting a steady stream of fire in every direction as Gary walked the head over to the arch to dispose of it. Then, he and Tyler both shoved the headless body through the arch like sumo wrestlers ganging up on a confused elephant. When they had finished, Tyler made the arch vanish, and he and Gary stood with their hands on their knees, breathing heavily.
When he’d finally caught his breath, Gary said, “Way to go, man. High-five!” He held his hand up, waiting for Tyler to slap it.
Tyler looked at Gary’s hand like it was plutonium.
“Come on, man, high-five!”
“Never.”
“Man, don’t leave me hanging.”
Tyler said, “I will always leave you hanging.”
Outside the pen, Jeff closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, you haven’t come up with any weapon that’s effective against my dragons.”
“They’re not really your dragons anymore,” Martin said. “They belong to the world now.”
“Please, don’t remind me.”
Phillip said, “We came up with an effective weapon. It works like a charm.”
“Then why didn’t you show us that?” Roy asked.
“We did. You’ve been looking right at it. We call it the goal. That glowy blue-arch thingy. It destroys the dragons instantly and completely. We figure we can just trick the dragons into going through it and that’s that. We came up with the other stuff we showed you while trying to think of an alternative to using the goal.”
Jeff asked, “Why would you want an alternative?”
“Because, like any really good weapon, it’s nearly as dangerous to us as it is to the dragons. The goal utterly destroys anything that goes through it by automatically isolating and deleting its entry, and only its entry, in the repository file. Really, the arch and the blue glow are just markers. The macro that creates them monitors a circular plane in space, then identifies and deletes the data of that specific instance of any object, but doesn’t delete or alter the object’s global codebase. It cleanly eradicates anything that passes through, including us.”
Jeff said, “So, if a dragon pulls us in with it . . .”
“. . . or if we fall through it on our own . . .” Brit added.
“. . . or just aren’t watching where we’re going and walk into it . . .” Gwen continued.
“. . . we’d be irrevocably dead,” Phillip finished.
Roy nodded. “I see why you used this delivery method. A ray would be more convenient, but if you miss, it’d be a disaster.”
“Can’t we put a force field up in front of the goal? Dragons go right through them, but they stop us.”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “That’s the first thing we did.”
“Oh,” Roy said. “Good. And does it work?”
“Should.”
“What do you mean, should? Haven’t you tested it?”
“How would you test it? We threw rocks and sticks at it, but that only proved it works for rocks and sticks. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work, but that doesn’t mean that it does. You know the safety on a gun should work, but would you test it by putting the gun to your head and pulling on the trigger as hard as you can?”
Phillip said, “The only way to be sure that it works for us would be for one of us to walk into it. We believe it would work, but if it doesn’t, the person testing it is dead. The only sensible course of action is to assume that it works, and do everything in our power to keep from ever finding out for sure.”
Brit said, “Don’t trust, and never verify.”
Roy said, “That doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
Gwen said, “It’s not supposed to.”
“Quite the opposite, in fact,” Phillip added. “So, that’s what we’ve come up with. How about you two?”
Roy said, “We’ve got some good news there. We were able to take the file entries for the dragons Jeff made and isolate certain chunks of code that are common to all of the randomly occurring dragons. Then, we did a global search of the file, and we came up with a snapshot of the rough location of all dragons, as of the moment we ran those ones out of Leadchurch.”
Gwen asked, “And are there more?”
“Yes, but it could have been worse,” Roy said. “Jeff used the entry of a sheep as his template. It seems that anywhere that breed of sheep lives, there was a small statistical probability of generating dragons, some of which, unfortunately, are rams. Luckily, he accidentally used a sheep from a rare breed that’s only in the British Isles.”
Jeff produced a small tablet computer from his robe pocket, tapped at it a few times, and turned it so the rest of the wizards could see.
“This,” Jeff said, “is the mess I’ve made. It’s a heat map of the dragon population, as of the moment we left town.”
The screen showed a map of England, Ireland, Scotland, and a bit of the west coast of Europe. Dark red blobs represented places where dragons had appeared. The bad news was that there were five blobs, all fairly distant from each other. The good news was that there were only five blobs, including Leadchurch. Also, those blobs were all on the island that contained England, Scotland, and Wales. None of the dragons had spawned anywhere else, and they had not managed to fly across the Channel, or to Ireland.
Roy said, “Jeff and I figure we can split up into four teams of two. The good ol’ buddy system. Leadchurch had the largest group, including Jeff’s original seven, all of which have now been destroyed. That leaves the four dragons we chased off, and three strays. Jeff and I will take care of them, then move on to London, where there appear to be five dragons on the outskirts of town. There’s a flock of eight in Yorkshire, four and two loners in Wales, and a big party of ten up in Scotland.”
Jeff said, “Once a team has dealt with their dragons, they’ll just check to see who’s still working and go help. Any questions?”
Brit said, “Yeah, do we have any idea how far these things can fly? Could they make it to Ireland or Fran
ce?”
Roy said, “We don’t know, but I don’t see any reason to assume they couldn’t. That’s just more reason to eradicate them as quickly as possible. Any more questions?”
Nobody said anything, but Jeff raised his hand.
“I was asking if any of them had a question for us,” Roy explained.
“Yeah, and they don’t,” Jeff said. “So now I have a question for them.”
“What is it, Jeff?” Phillip asked.
“Are you going to banish me?”
Phillip said, “I’m sorry, what?”
Jeff asked again, “Are you going to banish me?”
Phillip and the other wizards all looked at each other for a moment, then Phillip said, “We really haven’t discussed it, Jeff. You’re the first person to bring it up. I suppose now that you have, we’ll have to put it to a vote. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you that I would vote against it. Why are you asking us this?”
Jeff said, “I just want to know where I stand. I can’t believe the idea hadn’t occurred to any of you. I’d be tempted to banish me, after what I’ve done.”
Gwen said, “You made a mistake, Jeff. Everybody makes mistakes. We don’t banish people for it.”
Jeff said, “I’m pretty sure all three of the people we’ve banished would claim that we did it because they made mistakes.”
Tyler said, “Jimmy tried to kill us all and didn’t finish the job. That’s a way bigger mistake than the one you made.”
“And Todd showed us that he enjoyed torturing people,” Phillip said. “That’s a massive character flaw, not a mistake.”
Jeff said, “What about that wizard from Paris—Mitchell? We banished him, and he didn’t kill anybody. He didn’t even hurt anyone.”
“Mitchell,” Phillip said, “was a pathological liar. We all tried to ignore it, but it just got worse and worse. Eventually we just humored him, even Jimmy. You remember what that was like. He’d tell you to your face that he’d done things you knew he hadn’t, and all you could do was accept it and leave as fast as you could. We had to send him away.”
“And we didn’t really banish him,” Gwen said. “I mean, we banished him, but we didn’t banish, banish him. We sent him back to his time with a long, healthy lifespan and one hundred million dollars, and told him that if he ever touched his file entry, we’d take it all away and do something worse.”
“How’s he doing?” Tyler asked.”
Phillip said, “Last time we checked on him, he was running for mayor.”
13.
A group of ten able-bodied men, led by Mister Gibbons, set out on horseback immediately after the town meeting. When it became clear to Honor that she wouldn’t be allowed to go along, she gave them detailed directions through the forest to the giant cage.
“The woods are tough, and you’ll have to watch out for thorns, but it’s the best way. The riverbank isn’t trustworthy, and up north there are plants that burn if—”
Gibbons put a hand on Honor’s shoulder, both to reassure her that he was listening, and to get her to stop talking. “Thank you for your help, dearie. It’s much appreciated.”
“But you haven’t written down the directions, and with all due respect, you didn’t look like you were paying attention.”
Gibbons looked down at her and asked, “Honor, did anyone give you directions to this clearing?”
“No.”
“Well then, if a girl like you found it without directions, ten men should have no problem.”
Honor returned to the church and stayed there, at Sonny’s side, until late in the afternoon, when word came that the posse was on the way back.
Honor, along with most of the other townsfolk, made it to outskirts of the village in time to witness the party’s triumphant return.
Ten men sat or lay in the back of the hay cart that had gone to collect them. Their horses were nowhere to be found. Some of the men were covered with cuts, some had roughly made splints and crutches, some were soaking wet, and some had red, blotchy skin and painful-looking blisters. Most of them had more than one of these problems. Gibbons had all four.
Gibbons stood up on the cart, leaning heavily on a broken tree branch. “Friends, I am sad to report that we did not, in fact, reach the clearing, and as such we cannot directly confirm what young Honor claims to have seen. I will say, though, that I, for one, believe her, and I think all of the men who accompanied me will agree.”
Some of the men groaned.
Gibbons continued, “As soon as we left the road, it was as if the forest itself rose up to impede our progress. It attacked us relentlessly and mercilessly, and when we finally reemerged from the cursed woods, our horses had vanished. It had to be the wizards, my friends. There’s no other logical explanation.”
A woman in the crowd asked, “So what do we do now, Mister Gibbons?”
“The only thing we can do. We wait for the wizards to make their next move. When they do, I suggest we try to find out what they want, and then we give it to them. Take it from me, their magic is too strong to fight. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go home and rest.”
Gibbons limped through the crowd. Nobody tried to stop him.
Honor watched Gibbons and the rest of his merry band of former adventurers groan and grumble their way through the crowd, then walked directly back to the church, where she sat with her brother a little while before telling the nuns that she would have to go home to tend to the sheep. “Sister Flora,” Honor said. “I want to thank you for taking care of my brother, and for the food you offered me. It was very kind of you.”
Sister Flora said, “It’s our role to be kind, my dear. And, I’m sorry we had to make your doggie stay outside. I know it’s been allowed in before, but those were exceptions. I’m running things until His Excellency wakes up, and I had to reassert the rules.”
Honor said, “I understand, Sister Flora.”
“Good girl. Now, will you be safe walking home alone? I’m sure I could get one of the menfolk—”
“I’ll be fine on my own,” Honor said.
Sister Flora said, “I see.”
“Please watch my brother for me.”
“We will dear, we will. And we’ll get word to you as soon as he wakes up.”
As Honor emerged from the church into the sunlight, Runt was right where she had left her, curled up by the church door. Honor noted that while the nuns made it very clear that the dog could not come in, Runt had received a dish of water and a bone since Honor had last seen her.
Honor walked with speed and purpose. I’m not helping anyone sitting around waiting for something to happen, she thought. Anyway, I need to get out of this town. The nuns are nice but I can’t bear to look at the burnt buildings, I’m sick of the people, the place even smells awful. In fact, the smell seems to be getting a lot worse.
“Hello, young lady,” Hubert the dung sifter said.
Honor returned his greeting without smiling or slowing her stride. Hubert fell in beside her, matching her pace. On her other side, Runt kept up, but drifted a few feet away, lest Hubert’s aroma put her off the bone she carried in her mouth.
Hubert said, “Leaving, are you?”
Honor said, “Yes.”
“To tend to your sheep, no doubt.”
“Someone has to.”
“That’s very responsible of you. And then a good night’s sleep, I’d suspect.”
“I am tired.”
“Yes. Understandably.” They walked in silence for a moment, then Hubert said, “I was there to see the raiding party come back from the woods.”
“I was there, too.”
“Yes. I saw you there. Honor, I just want to talk to you for a moment. Do you know what my job is, Honor?”
“You remove the du
ng from privies and sift it.”
“Yes. I picked up the trade from my father. He’s been a dung sifter since before I was born, and I just sort of fell into it. The job, not the dung.”
“Hubert, why are you telling me this?”
“Please just hear me out, and my meaning will reveal itself, like a lost coin in the sifting pan. Anyway, I picked up the trade from my father. My earliest memories are of him holding his pan with one hand, swatting away flies with the other. For years, we sifted side by side, then one day, I realized that there had to be a better way.”
“A better way than sifting dung?”
“A better way to sift dung. I saw in my mind a series of finer and finer meshes, and a river of dung diverted through them. We could let the dung sift itself, and collect the spoils at the end of the day.”
“Did you tell your father?”
“Yes, and he didn’t want to hear it. He’d been sifting dung his whole life, and he didn’t think someone as young and inexperienced as me might be able to improve on his techniques.”
“What did you do?” Honor asked, now genuinely interested.
“I waited for him to get sick. We dung sifters are out sick a lot. Part of it’s the working conditions, and part of it’s that you don’t have to feel very bad to justify not getting out of bed to go sift the dung. Anyway, I waited until he got sick, then I built what I’d seen in my head. It wasn’t hard. It was just three screens and a ditch. When he came back to work, he found my invention already working, a larger pile of salvage than we usually found in a week, and me, sitting in the shade nearby, watching to make sure the screens held.”
“What did he say then?”
“That I had the beginnings of a good idea, and that he could probably improve on it and make it work.”
Honor snorted derisively.
Hubert laughed. “My point is, I know what it’s like to have people not pay attention to me, because I’m younger, or they think I’m below them. Understand?”
