Wizard’s Bane

Eleven Hacking Back

Heart’s Ease burned the whole night through. Far into the bleak winter morning sudden tongues of flame leapt from the ruins as the rubble shifted and the embers found fresh fuel. The walls stood, black and grim, but a little before dawn the roof crashed in, carrying with it what was left of the floors. There was nothing to do but stand aside and watch the flames. There was no help for Heart’s Ease.

Shiara buried Ugo, refusing Wiz’s offer of aid. Wiz didn’t press. He sat alone, wrapped in Shiara’s smoke-stained blue velvet cloak, utterly filled with pain and misery. Not even the chill of the stone beneath him penetrated.

It was mid-morning when Bal-Simba arrived. He came upon the Wizard’s Way, accompanied by a party of armed and armored guardsmen who quickly spread out to search for any of the League’s servants who might remain. The wizard closeted himself with Shiara for the rest of the day.

Wiz barely noticed. About noon he got up from his rock and returned to the tiny stable workroom in the clearing outside the palisade. It was almost evening when Bal-Simba found him there.

"You will be leaving Heart’s Ease," he told Wiz gently. "There is nothing left worth staying for. The Lady Shiara has agreed to accept accommodation closer to the Capital and you will live in the Wizard’s Keep itself. There is no longer any point in trying to hide you, it seems."

Wiz just nodded mutely.

"Shiara has told me what happened yesterday," he went on. "I hope you learned from it." He paused. "I am sorry the lesson had to be taught at such great cost," he said more gently.

Wiz said nothing. There was nothing to say. Bal-Simba waited, as if expecting some reply.

"What about Moira?" Wiz asked at last.

"Most likely she was stolen away for questioning in the City of Night. The raid here was masked by a whole series of attacks all along our southern perimeter. It seems the League has a powerful interest in your kind of magic so I would expect she will be taken to their citadel for interrogation."

"Shiara said it was me they were after," Wiz said miserably.

"Most likely. The League has been tearing the North apart seeking knowledge of you ever since you were Summoned. When your actions drew their attention here they came looking for a magician and Moira was the only one they could find."

"What will they do with Moira?"

Bal-Simba hesitated. "For now, nothing. The Shadow Warriors are fierce and cruel, but they are disciplined. Doubtless their orders are to bring her alive and unhurt to their master."

"And then?"

Bal-Simba looked grave and sad. "Then they will find out what they wish to know. You do not want the details."

"We’ve got to get her back!"

"We are searching," Bal-Simba said. "The Watchers have been scouring the plenum for trace of her. Our dragon riders patrol as far south as they dare. We have sent word to all the villages of the North and searchers have gone out."

"Can they find her?"

Bal-Simba hesitated. "I will not lie to you, Sparrow. It will be difficult. The Shadow Warriors use little magic and they are masters of stealth. We are doing everything we can."

"But you don’t think they’ll find her." It was a statement not a question.

"I said it would be difficult," Bal-Simba sighed. "The Shadow Warriors may already be upon the Freshened Sea, or even back in the City of Night itself. If that is so, she is lost. We only know they did not transport her magically."

"We’ll have to go get her! We can’t let them have her."

Bal-Simba sighed again and for the first time since Wiz had known him he appeared mortal—tired and defeated.

"I’m sorry Sparrow. Even if she is already upon the sea there is nothing we can do."

Rage rose up in Wiz, burning away the guilt and grief. "Maybe there’s nothing you can do, but there’s something I can do."

"What is that?"

Wiz interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. "I’m gonna hack the system," he said smiling in a manner that was not at all pleasant.

"Eh?"

"Those sons-of-bitches want magic? All right. I’ll give them magic. I’ll give them magic like they’ve never seen before!"

"It is a little late to start your apprenticeship, Sparrow," Bal-Simba said gravely.

"Apprenticeship be damned!" Said Wiz, taking slight satisfaction at the way the wizard started at the blasphemy. "I’ve spent the last five months building tools. I’ve got an interpreter, an editor, a cross-reference generator and even a syntax checker. They’re kludgier than shit, but I can make them do what I need. The didn’t call me Wiz for nothing!"

"Remember what happened the last time you tried."

Wiz’s face twisted. "You think I’m likely to forget?" He shook his head. "No, I know now what I did wrong. I knew it then, really. The next time I call up a hurricane it will be on purpose."

"Will you then compound your folly?" Bal-Simba asked sternly. "Will you add fresh scars to the land just to satisfy your anger?"

"Will you get Moira back any other way?" Wiz countered.

The Wizard was silent and Wiz turned back to the wooden tablets scattered over the rude table.

"Hurting us further would be an ill way to repay our hospitality to you," Bal-Simba said.

Wiz whirled to face him. "Look," he snapped. "So far your ’hospitality’ has consisted of kidnapping me, making me fall in love with someone who hates me, getting me chased by more damn monsters than I ever imagined and nearly getting me killed I don’t know how many times. When you get right down to it I don’t see that I owe you much of anything."

He glared at Bal-Simba, challenging him to deny it. But the giant black Wizard said nothing.

"There’s another thing," he went on. "You’re so damn worried about the effects of magic on your world. Well, your world is dying! Every year you’re pushed further back. It’s not just the League. There’s Wild Wood too. How long do you think you have before the whole North is gone? Do you really have anything to lose?

"All right, maybe I’ll screw it up again." He blinked back the tears that were welling up in his eyes. "I’ve done nothing but screw things up since I got here. Maybe I’ll make that scar on the land you keep talking about. But Dammit! At least I’ll go out trying."

"There’s no maybe about it," Bal-Simba said sharply. "You will ’screw it up.’ You have no magical aptitude and no training. At best you can destroy uncontrolled."

"Patrius didn’t think so," Wiz shot back. He turned to his tablets again.

"I could forbid you," Bal-Simba said in a measuring tone.

"You could," Wiz said neutrally. "But you’d have to enforce it."

Bal-Simba looked at him and Wiz stayed hunched over the tablets.

"I will do this much," he said finally. "I will not forbid you. I will not commit the resources of the North to this madness but I will send word to watch and be ready. If by some chance you do discomfit the League, we will make what use of it seems appropriate."

Wiz didn’t turn around. "Okay. Thanks."

"I will arrange for some protection for you in case the Shadow Warriors return. I will also pass word for everyone to avoid this place. I think you will scar the land and kill yourself unpleasantly in the process."

"Probably."

Bal-Simba sighed. "Losing a loved one is a terrible thing."

Wiz grinned mirthlessly, not looking up. "Even that wasn’t a free choice."

"Love is always a free choice, Sparrow. Even where there’s magic."

Wiz shrugged and Bal-Simba strode to the door of the hut. The black giant paused with his hand on the doorjamb.

"You’ve changed, Sparrow,"

"Yeah. Well, that happens."

Wiz did not see Bal-Simba leave. He stayed in the hut most of the day, scrawling on wooden tablets with bits of charcoal. Twice he had to go out to split logs into shingles for more tablets.

The second time he went to the woodpile Shiara approached him.

"They tell me you will make magic against the League," Shiara said.

Wiz selected a length of log and stood it upright on the chopping stump. "Yep."

"It is lunacy. You will only bring your ruin."

Wiz said nothing. He raised the axe and brought it down hard. The log cleaved smoothly under the blade’s bite.

"Where will you work?"

Wiz rested the axe and turned to her. "Here, Lady. I figure it’s safe enough and it seems appropriate."

"You will need help."

He hefted the axe and turned to the billet. "I can manage alone."

He raised the axe above his head and Shiara spoke again. "Would it go better if I were here for—ah—a core dump?"

Wiz started, the axe wobbled and the log went flying. "You’d do that? After what happened?"

"I would."

"Why? I mean, uh…"

"Why? Simple. You mean to strike at the League for what they did here when even Bal-Simba himself tells us we can do nothing. I owe the League much, and I would hazard much to repay a small part of that debt."

"It will be dangerous, Lady. Most of what you said about this thing is true. It’s a kludge and it’s full of bugs. I could kill us both."

For the first time since Wiz had known her, Shiara the Silver laughed. Not a smile or a chuckle, but a rich full-throated laugh, as bright and shining as her name.

"My innocent, I died a long time ago. My life passed with my magic, my sight and Cormac. The chance of dying against the chance of striking at the League is no hazard at all."

She glowed as bright and bold as the full moon on Mid-Sumemr Eve and held out her hand to Wiz. "Come Sparrow. We go to war."

Donal and Kenneth entered Bal-Simba’s study quietly, respectfully and with not a little trepidation. It was not every day that the Mightiest of the North summoned two ordinary guardsmen and even Donal’s naturally sanguine disposition didn’t lead him to believe that the wizard wanted to discuss the weather.

"I have a service it would please me to have done," Bal-Simba rumbled.

"Command us, Lord," said Kenneth, mentally bracing for it.

"That I cannot do," Bal-Simba told them. "This service carries a risk I would not order assumed."

Oh Fortuna, we’re in for it now! thought Kenneth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Donal looked unusually serious.

"May we ask the nature of this service?"

"There is a Sparrow whose nest needs guarding," Bal-Simba told them.

"Have you got any tea?" Wiz asked Shiara. They were sitting by the fire in the hut which had been the kitchen and was now their home. Both of them were hoarse from talking and Wiz was surrounded by a litter of wooden shingles with marks scrawled on them in charcoal.

"Herbs steeped in hot water? Are you ill?"

"No, I mean a drink that give you a lift, helps you stay awake."

Shiara’s brow furrowed. "There is blackmoss tea. I used to use it when I was standing vigil. But it is vile stuff."

"Do you have any?"

"In the larder, if it was not burned," she told him.

The tea was in a round birchbark box which had been scorched but not consumed. Wiz put a pot to boil on the hearth and watched as Shiara skillfully measured several spoonsful of the dried mixture into the hot water. The stuff looked like stable sweepings but he said nothing.

Shiara proferred the cup and Wiz took a gulp. It was brown as swamp water, so pungent it stung the nose and bitter enough to curl the tongue even with the honey Shiara had added.

"Gaaahhh" Wiz said, squinching his eyes tight shut and shaking his head.

"I told you it was vile," Shiara said sympathetically.

Wiz shook his head again, opened his eyes and exhaled a long breath. "Whooo! Now that’s programmer fuel! Lady, if we could get this stuff back to my world, we’d make a fortune. Jolt Cola’s for woosies!"

"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 the 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.

Then it was diving on them again.

Wiz rolled and rolled toward the edge of the clearing, heedless of the snow and mud. Kenneth’s bow thrummed again and Wiz heard the whine of the arrow as it passed close to his right. Then the beast shrieked and there was a heavy thud as it struck earth. Wiz looked up to see the golden dragon-thing on the ground not five yards from him. The wings were still spread and the animal was using a wickedly-taloned hind leg to claw at the arrow protruding from its breast. There was a spreading scarlet stain on the glowing golden scales and the creature roared again in rage and pain.

Suddenly a second arrow sprouted a hand’s span from the first. The animal stopped pawing at the arrow in its chest and brought its head up to look across the clearing. There was a disquieting intelligence in its eyes. Its head snaked around and it caught sight of Wiz. Without hesitating the beast dropped its leg and started toward him.

Kenneth’s great bow sang yet again and another arrow appeared in the thing, in the shoulder this time. But the beast paid it no heed. It advanced on Wiz with a terrible evil hunger in its eyes.

Wiz whimpered and scrambled backward, but his heavy cloak had wrapped itself around his legs and it tripped him as he tried to rise.

The creature craned its neck forward eagerly and the huge fanged mouth gaped shocking red against the golden body. The arrows in the chest wobbled in time with its labored breathing and the dark red blood ran in rivulets down its body to stain the snow carmine.

Again an arrow planted itself in the thing’s body and again it jerked convulsively. But still it came on, neck craning forward and jaws slavering open as it struggled to reach Wiz.

The great eyes were golden, Wiz saw, with slit pupils closed down to mere lines. The fangs were white as fresh bone, so close Wiz could have reached out and touched them could he have freed an arm from the cloak.

Suddenly the beast’s head jerked up and away from its prey and it screamed a high wavering note like a steamwhistle gone berserk.

Wiz looked up and saw Kenneth, legs wide apart and his broadsword clasped in both hands as he raised it high for the second stroke against the long neck. The guardsman brought the blade down again and then again, slicing through the neck scales and into the corded muscle beneath with a meat ax thunk.

The beast twisted its neck almost into a loop, shuddered convulsively, as was suddenly still.

The silence of the clearing was absolute, save for the breathing of the two men, one of them panting in terror and the other breathing hard from exertion.

"Lord, are you all right?"

"Ye… yes," Wiz told him shakily. "I’ll be…" He drew a deep breath of cold air and went into a coughing fit. "What was that thing?"

"One of the League’s creatures," Kenneth said somberly. "Now you see why you must not walk alone, Lord."

Wiz goggled at the golden corpse pouring steaming scarlet blood from the rents in the neck. "That was for me?"

"I doubt it came here by accident," Kenneth said drily.

Wiz tried to stand, but the cloak still tangled him. He settled for rolling over onto his hands and knees and then working the entangling folds of cloth out of the way before rising.

"You saved my life. Thank you."

The guardsman shrugged. "It was Bal-Simba’s command that you be protected," he said simply. "Can you walk, Lord?"

"Yes. I can walk."

"Then we had best get you back to the compound. You’ll catch cold, wet as you are."

Wiz looked down at his soaked and muddy cloak and for the first time felt the icy chill of his wet garments. He shivered reflexively.

"Besides," Kenneth said thoughtfully, "it is beginning to get dark and mayhap there are more of the League’s creatures about."

Wiz shivered again and this time it had nothing to do with the cold.

Back at the compound, Shiara was concerned but not surprised at the attack.

"We could hardly expect to keep ourselves secret forever," she sighed. "Still, it will be inconvenient to have to be much on our guard. I think it would be best if you discontinued your walks in the Woods, Sparrow."

"I was thinking the same thing myself, Lady," Wiz said fervently from the stool in front of the fire where he huddled. Save for a clean cloak he was naked and the fire beat ruddy and hot on his pale skin as he held the garment open to catch as much warmth as possible.

"Uh, Lady… I thought we were supposed to be protected against attacks like that."

Shiara frowned. "Sparrow, in the Wild Wood there is no absolute safety. Even with all the powers of the North arrayed about us we would not be completely safe. With Bal-Simba’s protection we are fairly immune to magic attack and the forest folk will warn of any large non-magical party that approaches. But a single non-magical creature can slip through our watchers and wards all too easily."

"What about a single magical creature?" Wiz asked.

Shiara smiled thinly, her lips pressed together in a tight line. "Believe me, Sparrow, I would know instantly of the approach of any magic."

From the corner where he had been listening, Kenneth snorted. "If all they can send against us are single non-magical beings then they stand a poor chance of getting either of you." He tugged the string of his great bow significantly. "Lady, I own the fault today was mine. I was not properly alert. But rest assured it will not happen again!"

"It would be well if it were so," Shiara said. "But I am not certain they expected to get anyone in today’s attack."

"They came darned close," Wiz said.

"Oh, had they killed or injured one of us the League would have been happy indeed, but I think they had little real expectation of it."

"Then what is the point?" asked Kenneth.

"In a duel of magics you seek at first to unbalance your opponent. To break his concentration and unsettle his mind and so lay him open to failure. I think the League’s purpose in such attacks is to upset us and hinder our work."

"Then they failed twice over," Wiz said firmly and stood up. "I’m dry enough and I’ve got work to do tonight. Kenneth, will you hand me my tunic?"

Another day, near evening this time, and Wiz had another creation to demonstrate to Shiara.

"Here, let me show you." Wiz made a quick pass and a foot-tall homunculus popped into existence. It eyed Wiz speculatively and then started to gabble in a high, squeaky voice.

"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890," the creature got out before Wiz could raise his hand again. At the second gesture it froze, mouth open.

"What good is that thing?" Shiara asked.

"You told me wizards protect their inner secrets with passwords? Well, this is a password guesser. When it gets up to speed it can run through thousands of combinations a second." He frowned. "I’m going to have to do some code tweaking to get the speed up, I think."

"What makes you think you can guess a password even with such a thing as that?" Shiara said.

Wiz grinned. "Because humans are creatures of habit. That includes wizards. The thing doesn’t guess at random. It uses the most likely words and syllables."

"Ricidulous," Shiara snorted. "A competent wizard chooses passwords to be hard to guess."

"I’ll bet even good wizards get careless. You remember I told you we used passwords on computer accounts back home? There was a list of about 100 of them which were so common they could get you into nearly any computer and the chances were at least one person had used one of them.

"Look, a password has to be remembered. I mean no one but an idiot writes one down, right?" Shiara nodded reluctantly. "And you have to be able to say them, don’t you?" Again Shiara nodded.

"Well then, those are major limits right there. You need combinations of consonants and vowels that are pronounceable and easy to remember. You also can’t make them too long and you probably don’t want to make them too short. Right? Okay, this little baby," he gestured to the demon on the table, "has been given a bunch of rules that help guess passwords. It’s not a random search."

"But even so, Sparrow, there are so many possible combinations."

"That’s why he talks so fast, Lady."

They brought Moira on deck the day the Tiger Moth raised the southern coast.

With no one at her oars and no wind behind her, the Tiger Moth ghosted between the great black towers that guarded the harbor. From the headlands of the bay mighty breakwaters reached out to clasp the harbor in their grasp. Where the breakwaters almost touched, two towers of the black basalt rose to overlook the harbor entrance. Great walls of dark rhyolite enclosed the city with its tall towers and narrow stinking streets snaking up the sides of an ancient volcano.

Everywhere the southland was bleak and blasted. The earth had been ripped open repeatedly by magic and nature and had bled great flows of lava. Now it was dark and scabbed over as if the wounds had festered rather than healed. The sky was dark and lowering, lead gray and filled with a fine gritty ash that settled on everything. In the distance dull red glows reflected off the clouds where still-active volcanoes rumbled and belched. The chill south wind brought the stink of sulfur with it. Nothing lived in this land save by magic.

Moira was hustled off the ship and hurried up the street by a dozen of the false fishermen. After days in the cramped cubby it was agony for her to walk. But her captors forced the pace cruelly even when she cried into her gag in pain.

The street ended suddenly in a great wall composed of massive blocks of dark red lava. The party turned right at the wall and there, in a shallow dead-end alley, was a tiny door sheathed in black iron. The Shadow Captain knocked a signal on the door and a peephole slid back, revealing a hideously tusked unhuman face. Quickly the door opened and Moira was thrust through into the midst of a group of heavily armored goblins. The goblins closed in and bore her off without a word or backward glance.

"Only one magician, you say?" Toth-Set-Ra asked the Shadow Captain harshly.

"Only the woman, Dread Master. There were two other humans within the walls, the former witch they call Shiara and a man called Sparrow. She called him Wiz."

"And they were not magicians?"

"I would stake my soul upon it."

Toth-Set-Ra eyed him. "You have, captain. Oh, you have."

The Shadow Captain blanched under the wizard’s gaze. "I found no other sign of a magician there," he repeated as firmly as he could manage.

"There should have been at least one other magician, a man. You’re sure this Wiz or Sparrow was not a magician?"

"He had not the faintest trace of magic about him," said the Shadow Captain. He was not about to tell Toth-Set-Ra there had been something strange about that man.

"We shall see," Toth-Set-Ra said and waved dismissal. "Now return to your ship and await my pleasure." The Shadow Captain abased himself and backed from the room.

Toth-Set-Ra watched him go and drummed his fingers on the inlaid table. He was frantically anxious to know what this new prisoner could tell him, but he was skilled enough in the ways of interrogation to know that a day or two of isolation in his dungeons would do much to break her spirit. Question a magician too soon and she was likely to resist to the point of death. First you must shake her, wear away her confidence. Then she would be more pliable to magical assaults and more susceptible to pain.

Tomorrow would be soon enough. Let her lie a while in the dungeons. Then let five or six of the goblins use her. And then, then it would be easy to find out what she knew.

He smiled and his face looked more like a skull than ever. Yes, it would take a little time. But then, he had the time.

"(defun replace—variables (demon))" Wiz muttered, sketching on a clean plank with a bit of charcoal. "(let((!bindings nil)))"

"Lord."

"(replace—variables-with-bindings(demon))"

Wiz turned from the spell he was constructing to see Donal standing in the door, near blocking out the light.

"You made me lose my place," he said accusingly.

"Sorry Lord, but it’s Kenneth. He’s asked for you and the Lady."

Reluctantly Wiz put down the stick of charcoal and stood up, feeling his back creak and his thighs ache from sitting in one position on the hard bench too long. "What is it?" he asked. "More trouble?"

Donal regarded Wiz seriously. "I think he wants to sing a song," he said.

"A song?" Wiz asked incredulously. "He takes me away from my work to sing a song?"

Donal’s face did not change. "Please, Lord. It is important."

As they stepped out of the hut, Wiz realized it was mid-morning. The air was still chill, but no longer iron-hard. The sun was warm even as the earth was cold. Spring was on its way, Wiz thought idly as Donal led him to the courtyard. Shiara was already there, sitting on the stump used to chop firewood, her stained and worn blue cloak wrapped firm around her, but the hood thrown back and her hair falling like a silver waterfall down her back.

Kenneth stood facing her. He was holding a small iron-stringed harp Wiz had never seen before. From time to time he would pick a string and listen distractedly to the tone.

Music, Wiz thought. In all the time I’ve been here I’ve never heard human music. His resentment dulled slightly and he pulled a small log next to Shiara for a seat.

Shiara reached a hand out of her cloak and clasped Wiz’s hand briefly.

"You may begin Kenneth," she said.

Kenneth’s expression did not change. He struck a chord and a silvery peal floated across the court and up to the smokestained peak of Heart’s Ease.

His voice was a clear pure tenor and the sound sent chills down Wiz’s spine. There was loss and sadness in the music and the pain Wiz had felt since that terrible night Heart’s Ease fell came rushing back with full vigor. Instinctively he moved closer to Shiara.

Kenneth’s voice belled up over the harp and the song was strong off the ruined stone walls behind.

He stopped then, lowered the harp and bowed his head.

"Thank you, Kenneth," said Shiara. And Wiz stepped forward to embrace the soldier roughly.

"The mood was upon me, Lady," Kenneth said simply. "When the mood is upon me, I must."

"And well done," said Shiara, standing up. "Thank you for the omen."

"So, Sparrow," she sighed. "We go soon. Do we go tomorrow?"

"I don’t know Lady," Wiz protested. "I’ve still got some spells to tune and…" Unbidden a quotation from his other life rose in his mind. There comes a time in the course of any project to shoot the engineers and put the damn thing into production. He raised his chin firmly.

"Tomorrow, Lady. Tomorrow we strike."