Wizard’s Bane w-1

by Rick Cook

  "That is what you wanted?" Shiara said in surprise.

  "That’s exactly what I wanted. Now let’s let it steep some more and get back to work."

  Bal-Simba’s guardsmen showed up the next day. They were a matched set: Dark-haired, blue eyed and tough enough to bite the heads off nails for breakfast. Kenneth, the taller of the pair, carried a six-foot bow everywhere he went and Donal, the shorter, less morose one, was never far from his two-handed sword. In another world Wiz would have crossed the street to avoid either of them, but here they were very comforting to have around.

  With their help Wiz moved his things out of the old stable and into one of the buildings in the compound. The accommodations were not much of an improvement, but it was closer to the huts where they now lived and Shiara could come to it more easily to advise him.

  "What do you think of this Sparrow?" Donal asked Kenneth one night in the hut they shared. Kenneth looked up from the boot knife he was whetting. "I think he’s going to get us all killed or worse."

  "The Lady trusts him."

  "The Lady, honor to her name, hasn’t been right in the head since Cormac died," Kenneth said. "That’s why she’s been living out here. Even for a magician she’s odd."

  "Not half as odd as the sparrow," said Donal. "I don’t think he’s slept in three days. He sits in there swilling that foul brew and muttering to himself."

  "He’s a wizard," pronounced Kenneth as if that explained everything. "All wizards are cracked."

  "They say he’s not a wizard," said Donal. "They say he’s something else."

  "That’s all the world needs," Kenneth said. "Something else that works magic. I say he’s a wizard and I’ll be damned surprised if we come out of this one whole."

  "Well," said Donal as he stretched out on the straw tick. "At least he keeps things interesting."

  "So does plague, pox and an infestation of trolls," said Kenneth, replacing the knife in his boot.

  Toth-Set-Ra sat on his raised seat in the League’s chantry and heard the reports of his underlings. The great mullioned windows let in the weak winter’s light to puddle on the floor. Magical lanterns hung from the walls provided most of the light that glinted off apparatus on the workbenches. Seated at a long table at his feet were the dozen most powerful sorcerers of the Dark League. Atros sat at his right. The Keeper of the Sea of Scrying was just finishing his report.

  "And what else?" asked Toth-Set-Ra.

  "Lord, there are signs of magical activity at Heart’s Ease. It is possible the Shadow Warriors missed the magician."

  Atros scowled at the man. The Shadow Warriors were his special preserve.

  "Our magic detectors are excellent," Toth-Set-Ra said. "If there was another magician there, we would have found him."

  "As you will, Lord. But we still show signs of magic in what was once a dead zone."

  "Strong magic? Like before?"

  The black robe shrugged. "Not strong, Lord, but the taste is much like before. The magician is… odd."

  A thrill went down Toth-Set-Ra’s spine as he remembered the demon’s words.

  "Perhaps our magician had an apprentice who was absent when the attack came," Atros suggested.

  "You say not as strong as before?" Toth-Set-Ra asked. The black-robed one nodded. "Then watch closely," he ordered. "I wish to know all which happens at that place."

  "Thy will, Lord," the black robe replied. "But it will not be easy. The northerners are screening it and we cannot get clear readings."

  "Keep trying," he snapped.

  "Thy will, Lord. Perhaps however the Shadow Warriors should return."

  Toth-Set-Ra shook his head. "No, that is a trick which only works once. Bal-Simba—may the fat melt from his miserable bones!—will not be caught napping again." He frowned and sunk his head to his chest for a moment. "But I am not without resources in this matter. I will see what my other servants can do."

  Night and day, Wiz drove himself mercilessly. Writing, thinking, rewriting and conducting occasional experiments—usually in the forest with only Donal or Kenneth for company. He slept little and only when exhaustion forced him to. Twice he nearly slipped because of fatigue. After that he made a point of getting a little rest before trying an experiment.

  The blackmoss tea numbed his tongue and made his bowels run, but it kept him awake, so he kept drinking it by the mugful.

  Wiz wasn’t the only one getting little or no sleep. Shiara wasn’t sleeping much either and there was no blackmoss tea to ease her. Wiz passed her hut late at night and heard her sobbing softly from pain. The lines in her face etched themselves deep around her mouth and down her forehead, but she never complained.

  "Lady, you are suffering from all this magic," Wiz said to her one afternoon as they waited for a spell to finish setting up.

  "I have suffered for years, Sparrow."

  "Do you need a rest?"

  A haggard ghost of a smile flitted across her face. "Would you rest, Sparrow?"

  "You know the answer to that, Lady."

  "Well then," she said and returned to her work.

  And the work seemed to go so slowly. Often Wiz would get well into a spell only to have to divert to build a new tool or modify the interpreter. It was like writing a C compiler from scratch, libraries and all, when all you wanted was an application. Once he had to stop work on the spells entirely for three precious days while he tore apart a goodly chunk of the interpreter and rewrote it from the ground up. He knew the result would be more efficient and faster, but he gritted his teeth and swore at the delay.

  Wiz took to talking to the guards, one of whom was with him constantly when he worked. Neither Kenneth or Donal said much as he favored them with his stream of chatter. Donal just leaned on his two-handed sword and watched and Kenneth simply watched.

  Worst of all, he had to be painstakingly careful in constructing his spells. A bug here wouldn’t just crash a program, it could kill him.

  There was no one to help him. Shiara had no aptitude for the sort of thinking programming demanded and there was no time to teach her. Besides, even being around this much magic was an agony for her. Actually trying to work some, even second-hand might kill her.

  But somehow, slowly, agonizingly, the work got done.

  * * *

  "Behold, my first project," Wiz said with a flourish. He had been without sleep so long he was giddy and the effects of the tea had his eyes propped open and his brain wired. Consciously he knew that he desperately needed sleep, but his body was reinforcing the tea with an adrenaline rush and it would be some time before he could make himself crash.

  Shiara held out her hand toward the silky transparent thing on the table. It moved uneasily like a very fine handkerchief on a zephyr.

  "What is it?"

  "It’s a detector. You can send it over an area and it will detect magic and report back what it, uh, senses. ’Sees’ would be too strong a word. It doesn’t really see, it just senses and it sends back a signal." He realized he was speed-rapping and shut up.

  Shiara moved her fingers through the thing’s substance, feeling for the magic. The detector continued to flutter undisturbed by the intrusion in to its body. "That is not much use," she said doubtfully. "It sees so little and can tell so little of what it sees." She drew her hand back sharply and the gesture reminded Wiz how much it cost her to have anything to do with magic.

  "One of them is almost no good at all. But I’m going to produce them by the hundreds. I’ll flood the Freshened Sea with them. I’ll even send them over the League lands—who knows?—perhaps the City of Night itself."

  Shiara frowned even more deeply. "How long did it take you to produce this ’detector’?"

  "Separate from the tools? I don’t know. Maybe three days."

  "And you will make hundreds of them? In your spare time, perhaps. Impractical, Sparrow. Or do you plan to teach the craft to a corps of apprentices?"

  "Oh, no. When I say three days, I mean the time it took me to write t
he program to make them. Once I run some tests and make sure it’s up to spec, I’ll start cranking them out automatically."

  "You will not need to watch them made? Isn’t that dangerous?"

  Wiz shook his head. "Not if I do it right. That’s the whole point of the interpreter, you see. It lets you spawn child processes and controls their output."

  It was Shiara’s turn to shake her head. "Magic without a magician. A true wonder, Sparrow."

  "Yeah," said Wiz uncomfortably, "well, let’s make sure it works."

  Silent, dumb and near invisible as a smear of smoke, the thing floated above the Freshened Sea. Sunlight poured down upon it. Waves glittered and danced below. Occasionally birds and other flying creatures wheeled or dove above the tops of the waves within its view. Once a splash bloomed white as a sea creature leaped to snare a skimming seabird.

  A human might have been entranced by the beauty, oppressed by the bleakness or bored to inattention by the unchanging panorama below. The wisp of near-nothingness was none of these things. It saw all and understood nothing. It soaked in the impressions and sent them to a bigger and more solid thing riding the air currents further north. That thing, a dirty brown blanket perhaps large enough for a child, flapped and quivered in the sea winds as it sucked up sense messages from the wisp and hundreds of its fellows. Mindlessly it concentrated them, sorted them by content and squirted them back to a crag overlooking the Freshened Sea where three gargoyles crouched, staring constantly south.

  The gargoyles too soaked in the messages. But unlike the things lower in the hierarchy and further south, they understood what they saw. Or at least they were capable of interpreting the images, sounds and smells, sorting according to the criteria they had been given and acting on the results.

  Most of what came their way, the sun on the waves, the fish-and-mud smell of the sea, the wheel of the seabirds, they simply discarded. Some, such as the splash and foam of a leaping predator, they stored for further correlation. A very few events they forwarded immediately to a glittering thing atop a ruined tower in a charred stockade deep in the Wild Wood.

  Thus it was that a certain small fishing boat seemed bound to pass beneath the cloud of wisps which was gradually blanketing the Freshened Sea. But no net is perfect and no weave is perfectly fine. Scant hours before the last of the insubstantial detectors wafted into position in that area, the boat sailed placidly through the unseen gap in the unsensed net.

  Her name was the Tiger Moth. Her sails and rigging were neat and well cared for but not new. Her hull was weathered but sturdy with lines of dark tar along the weatherbeaten planks where she had been caulked for the winter’s work. In every way and to every appearance she was a typical small fisher, plying a risky trade on the stormy winter waters of the Freshened Sea. If you looked you could find perhaps a hundred such boats upon the length and breadth of the sea at this season.

  On the deck of the Tiger Moth, the captain of the Shadow Warriors looked at the clouds and scowled. There was another storm in the offing and naturally it would come from the south, blowing the vessel and its precious cargo away from League waters and safety. One more delay in a long series of delays. The Shadow Captain swore to himself.

  His orders were strict. Bring the captured magician back at all costs. Do not fly. Use no magic which might attract attention, not even the sort of simple weather spells a fisherman with a mite of magical ability could be reasonably expected to possess.

  When the flying beasts brought the raiders back to their seashore camp, he had bundled his captive aboard the waiting boat and set out at once for the League’s citadel in the City of Night. The other raiders had rested the day and then flown off on their great gray steeds after sunset. They had been back at the City of Night for days now, while the Shadow Captain and his crew of disguised fishermen faced more days of sailing to reach the same destination. It was much safer to sneak his prize south like this at the pace of an arthritic snail, but it tried even the legendary patience of a Shadow Warrior.

  The sea was against them. That was to be expected at this time of the year, when what winds there were blew up from the south and the frequent storms came from the south as well. It was not a time for swift travel upon the Freshened Sea.

  The Shadow Captain knew too that the Council was searching strongly for him and his prisoner. Several patrols of dragon riders had flapped overhead, gliding down to mast-top height to check him and his boat. The Shadow Captain had stood on the poop and waved to them as any good Northerner would, never hinting that what the dragon riders sought lay in a secret cubby in the bow of his vessel.

  For two days his ship had been trailed by an albatross which floated lazily just off the wavetops as if searching for fish in the Tiger Moth’s wake. It had not escaped the Shadow Captain’s notice that the bird never came within bowshot.

  While the albatross was with them, the Shadow Warriors had acted the part of fishermen, casting their nets and pulling in a reasonable catch, which they gutted and salted down on the deck. Thus they kept their cover, but it slowed them even more.

  And now a storm, the Shadow Captain thought, Fortuna!

  * * *

  The object quivered gossamer and insubstantial in the magic field which held it, fluttering weakly against the invisible walls.

  "What is it?" Atros asked.

  "We do not know, Lord," the apprentice told him. "One of our fliers found it in the air above the city."

  "What does it do?"

  "We do not know."

  "Well, what do you know?" the magician snapped.

  "Only that we have never seen its like before," the apprentice said hastily.

  "Hmmm," Atros rubbed his chin. "Might it be neutral?"

  The apprentice shrugged. "Quite possibly, Lord. Or perhaps the work of a hedge magician. No wizard would waste his substance making such a bagatelle."

  The magician regarded the caged thing on the table again. He extended his senses and found only a slight magic—passive magic at that. "Very well. Return to your watch. Inform me if any more of these are found."

  "Thy will, Lord. But they are very hard to find or see."

  "Wretch! If I need instruction from apprentices I will ask for it. Now begone before I give you duty in the dung pits."

  "What does this do?" Shiara asked, tracing the slick surface of Wiz’s latest creation dubiously.

  "It’s a Rapid Reconnaissance Directional Demon—R-squared D-squared for short." He grinned.

  "Eh?"

  "It’s an automatic searcher. It transports to a place, searches for objects which match the pattern it’s been given and if it doesn’t find such an object, it transports again. When it does find the object, it reports back. It has a tree-traversing algorithm to find the most efficient search pattern."

  "I doubt you’ll find what you want in a tree," Shiara said doubtfully.

  "No, that’s just an expression. It’s a way of searching. You see, you pick a point as the root and…"

  "Enough, Sparrow, enough," said Shiara holding up her hand. "I will trust you in this." She frowned. "But why did you make it in this shape?"

  "To match its name," Wiz grinned.

  "You see, Kenneth, names are very important," Wiz said seriously. "Picking the right ones is vital."

  Wiz sucked another lungful of cold clear air and exhaled a breath that was almost visible. Overhead the sun shone wanly in a cloudless pale blue sky. The weak winter’s light gave the unsullied snow a golden tinge.

  "Yes, Lord," replied Kenneth noncomittally from where he lounged against a tree, his long bow beside him.

  Wiz paid no heed to the response. He continued to pace the little clearing as he talked, not really looking at Kenneth at all. The crusted snow crunched under his boots as he circled the open space among the leafless trees yet again.

  "The wizards are right," Wiz went on. "Names are critical. You need a name that you can remember, that you can pronounce easily and that you aren’t likely to use in conversation
." He smiled. "It wouldn’t do to ask someone to pass the salt and summon up a demon, would it?"

  "No, Lord," said Kenneth tonelessly

  Wiz never stopped talking, even though Kenneth was behind him now. "And most importantly, Kenneth, most importantly I need names that easily distinguish the named routine, uh, demon. I can’t afford to get mixed up."

  "Yes, Lord."

  "It’s a common problem in programming. There’s a trick to naming routines meaningfully without violating the conventions for the language or getting things confused." Wiz altered his stride slightly to avoid a spot where a dark rock had melted the snow into a dirty brown puddle. "Here I’m using a mixture of names of Unix utilities for routines that have cognates in Unix and made-up names for the entities that aren’t similar to anything. So I have to pick the names carefully."

  "Yes Lord." Kenneth shifted slightly against the tree and squinted at the pale sun, which was almost touching the treetops. Fingers of shadow were reaching into the clearing, throwing a tangled net of blue across the golden snow and dirty slush alike.

  "It’s especially important that I keep the difference in the similar routines straight," Wiz said. "I have to remember that "find" doesn’t work like "find" in Unix. In Unix…"

  "Lord…" said Kenneth craning his neck toward the lowering sun.

  "… the way you search a file is completely different. You . . ."

  "Lord, get…"

  A harsh metallic screech stopped Wiz in his tracks. He looked over his shoulder and glimpsed something huge and spiky outlined against the sun.

  "Down!" Wiz dropped into the dirty slush as the thing barrelled over him. The wind of its passing stirred his hair and one of its great hooked talons slashed the hem of his cloak.

  Open-mouthed, he looked up from the freezing mud in time to see a scaly bat-winged form of glittering gold zooming up from the clearing, one wing dipping to turn again even as its momentum carried it upward.

  From across the clearing Kenneth’s bowstring sang and a tiny patch of pale blue daylight appeared in the membrane of the thing’s left wing close to the body. The creature craned its snaky golden neck over its shoulder and hissed gape-fanged at its tormentor.