Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

Wiz noticed that there were no containers in the pile. No chests, no bags, nothing that could be used to transport or contain the hoard. It was as if it had been carefully brought here and emptied out and then the containers removed.

"Where do you suppose this came from?"

"Your dark wizards, or whatever." Malkin ran her fingers through the pile.

"Whoever it was is long gone."

"You hope," Wiz retorted.

With a clatter and the ringing sound of falling gold hitting the stone floor, Glandurg burrowed into the pile like a homesick gopher. Suddenly his head emerged from the top, sending a shower of wealth cascading down the mound. He spat out a ruby the size of a hen’s egg and grinned gleefully.

"Look, people," Wiz said, "this isn’t what we’re here for."

"But it doesn’t hurt," retorted Malkin, who was already elbow-deep in a mass of gold coins.

Danny threw himself down in the treasure; scooped up handfuls and poured it over his head. He winced when a particularly heavy and tasteless gold goblet hit him on me head. "Hey, Scrooge McDuck was onto something with his money bin." Wiz hesitated. He didn’t like this at all and he sure didn’t want to be encumbered by a lot of dead weight. But obviously the attraction of all that loot was an irresistible force for Glandurg and Malkin.

"We need a way to carry this stuff," Malkin said.

"If you think I’m going to whomp up a levitation spell just so we can take that along with us, you’re crazy." Malkin and Glandurg looked at him.

"Okay," he sighed, "you can take what you can carry in a cloak."

It took Malkin and Glandurg a minute to decide whose cloak was bigger. Then they started shoveling gold, jewels and other treasure from the pile. When the heap on Malkin’s cape was about three feet high in the center they stopped for breath.

"" Now try to move it," Wiz said.

Dwarf and thief each seized an edge of the cloak and gave a mighty tug. The pile moved perhaps six inches.

"What you need is a cart," Danny suggested.

"Won’t work. Floors too rough."

"Okay," Wiz said, "if it will get us moving again, I’ve got a spell that reduces friction to almost nothing. That will make the cloak easier to haul. But we’re burying the stuff the first chance we get."

He stepped forward, raised his staff and spoke a few words.

"There, it should pull easily now."

Malkin tugged on the edge of her cloak and nearly went over backwards when her hands slipped off the material. Glandurg grabbed and yanked and went careening into Malkin when his hands slipped. Both of them landed in a tangle on the rocky floor and glared at Wiz.

"Okay, let me modify the spell."

He drew a breath to list out the spell, but before he could exhale he heard a noise from beyond the circle of light. Something was moving out there in the dark.

"Ah, folks:" Danny began. He never finished the sentence. He didn’t need to. Wiz didn’t know if it was the biggest dragon he’d ever seen or not. For one thing, the cavern was mostly dark. For another he couldn’t see all of it. But primarily, he was too scared to take accurate measurements. If it wasn’t the biggest dragon he’d ever seen it would do quite nicely for now.

The dragon spouted a gout of flame that illuminated the cavern to its corners and left a dark smear of an afterimage clouding his vision. He tried to raise his staff to cast a spell and realized he was magically frozen in place. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the others straining to move as well. The dragon fire had been misdirection while the creature pinned them where they stood with a spell.

Its enemies neutralized, the dragon lumbered forward for the kill

Wiz muttered under his breath.

Talons extended, the dragon’s left front paw landed on the cavern floor and promptly flew out from under him, dumping the beast on his nose. The great muzzle slipped on the floor and left the dragon lying spread-eagled and neck extended on the glistening limestone.

However dragons are not so easily defeated. The huge talons on all four feet dug into the limestone as if it were soft clay and the beast levered itself erect. It crouched to spring across the intervening distance at its prey, but its purchase failed just as it leapt and the dragon went sprawling and slithering across the cavern. Wiz and the others watched fascinated as the dragon slid helplessly by, bit the cave wall behind them and rebounded back into the cavern like a pool ball coming off the side rail

Wiz had cast the reduce-friction spell not on the floor, but on the dragon.-That not only made the dragon slippery all over, but it charged the beast to a high magic potential-and made every stalagmite, stalactite, flow-stone and ordinary rock in the cavern repel him violently. The creature had put enormous power into his spring and lost almost none of it in the inelastic collisions. As a result a very unhappy dragon went caroming off everything he hit, and he managed to hit just about everything in the cave except Wiz and his friends.

Every time the beast struck a rock it let out a roar and a gout of flame, making the walls ring and lighting the cavern to its edges. The result was like being in a giant pinball machine during especially active play.

Finally the dragon slid backwards into a tunnel off the main cave. A quick, precisely aimed lightning bolt struck inside the tunnel and collapsed the mouth into a pile of rock Behind the landslide they could hear the faint roaring of a very unhappy dragon.

"Dragon in the side pocket!" Danny whooped "Awesome."

Wiz discovered he could move again. "Let’s get our awes out of here before that dragon digs himself out. Move it people!"

"But the treasure!" Malkin protested.

"Mark it on the map and we’ll pick it up on the way out. Now come on!" Everyone complied, but Wiz noticed that Malkin and Glandurg clinked suspiciously as they hurried down the tunnel.

There was a dragon asleep beside the fire, with only an occasional tail twitch or foot thump to show he was dreaming dragonish dreams.

It was in fact an achingly normal scene for the programmers’ workroom, if you could ignore the whispering shadows outside the windows.

Jerry Andrews stared at the four screens hanging above his desk and bit his lip. As decoration they were spectacular, all neon colors ranging through the whole spectrum with annotations and hypertext finks in other glaring colors. As information they were just about use-

"Shit," Jerry exclaimed, throwing himself backwards so hard his chair creaked. The dragon lifted his head questioningly.

"My Lord?" Moira asked as her personality asserted itself.

"It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this frustrated."

As a hacker’s significant other, Moira recognized the signs. Jerry needed a sounding board. She also knew that a sympathetic ear was more important than cogent advice. A Siamese cat would do the job nicely if it meowed in the appropriate spots.

"A difficult problem?"

Jerry grinned but there was no joy in it "I don’t even know enough to know that" He spun around in the chair to face the dragon on the hearth.

"Normally on a job like this where you’ve got a pile of observables-stuff-and no paradigm, you just grab hold of anything that looks likely and see where it leads. You poke and prod at it and see what happens and eventually you can make sense out of what you’re seeing. Here-" he waved a hand expressively. "Here no matter where I grab and how much I poke and prod I don’t get anything that makes sense."