Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

"My Lady, are you all right?" Bal-Simba asked.

The dragon shook his head feebly, as if trying to clear it. Then he heaved himself upright. For an instant Jerry was afraid he would fall, but the dragon steadied and seemed to draw inner strength.

"How do you feel?" Jerry asked.

"Let us get on with it," Moira said grimly.

Jerry was relieved both at the dragon’s apparent recovery and at Moira’s response. He hadn’t been absolutely sure that Moira would be able to talk to them in this world

"Where are we?" Bal-Simba asked, craning his neck to look at the

three-story-stack of crates surrounding them.

"We’re in a storage area next to an exhibit hall, but I don’t recognize which one."

He looked around trying to orient himself. It wasn’t easy. The view at ground level was completely blocked by the stacks of crates. Beyond the crates on one side was a solid brick wall, perhaps four stories high. Above that were two hotel towers perhaps twenty stories high each. Scanning the horizon over the tops of the crates he could see mountains in the distance and here and there tall buildings, obviously more hotels. The sky above was pale turquoise blue with just a few wisps of high clouds.

"I don’t recognize this at all," Jerry said. This isn’t the Convention Center. It must be one of the new hotels."

"What do we do first?"

Jerry looked at Bal-Simba in his leopard-skin kilt, bone necklace and blue cloak. "First we get some clothes. No, first we get some money."

It took them a while to find their way out of the wooden maze. Finally, with the help of some rather profane instructions from a startled forklift driver who nearly ran over them, they found a gate and stepped into a parking lot dominated by a fleet of semis, trailers and satellite dishes.

"Okay," Jerry said, looking around, "this is the Paladin. That tells me where we are, more or less."

Bal-Simba and Moira didn’t say anything. They were too busy staring. There was reason to stare. Off in one direction a castle raised pinnacled towers to the pale blue sky. In another a giant lion of blue glass crouched, and off to the side stood a glittering black pyramid. A tropical rain forest rose under a glittering dome, a gigantic brightly striped pavilion stood in another direction. Off in the distance there were more spires and domes. That all these wonders were accompanied by nearly identical blocky high-rise towers sheathed in golden glass did nothing to dim the effect on Bal-Simba and Moira,

"Amazing," Bal-Simba said at last. "Moira may have seen its like before, but it is new to me."

"This is unlike what I saw before of this world," Moira told him.

"This is Las Vegas," Jerry explained. "It’s unlike just about anything." He looked around, getting his bearings and then patted the brown suede purse that hung from his belt. "Come on, let’s go around to the front."

They trudged across acres of asphalt crammed with automobiles, threaded their way between the towering hotel block and a multi-story parking garage and finally emerged at the front of the hotel.

As soon as they came around the corner their surroundings changed completely. Jerry led them up a walkway beside a winding drive, past groves of palm trees and stands of giant bamboo springing from an impossibly green lawn. They passed statues in classical poses, acorn-pound holding several white tigers, crossed over a bridge above a pool housing a number of dolphins, passed an artificial geyser at a discreet distance and finally came to the bank of glass doors leading into the hotel proper.

"Moira, you’d better wait outside," Jerry told the dragon. "I’m not sure what their rules are on animals and I don’t think we can pass you off as a seeing eye dog."

"Well enough, My Lord," Moira said. "It sounds excessively noisy in any event."

"I begin to understand why the search will be difficult," Bal-Simba said as soon as they were through the door and out of Moira’s earshot. "This place is larger than I had imagined."

"Oh, this is only one of the places we’ve got to look There are maybe a couple of dozen more this big or bigger. One 01 the problems we’ve got is that the show is spreading out again. For a while they had all the exhibits concentrated in just two big exhibit halls and the Hilton next to the Convention Center," Jerry said "But those overflowed and they’ve had to start using the hotel exhibition space again."

Bal-Simba started forward toward the line of clerks and away from the racket in the casino, but Jerry stopped him.

"No, this is just the registration area. What we want is probably the tellers cage. That’s over this way."

Bal-Simba frowned slightly but followed Jerry out into the maze of the casino. Everywhere there were lights, colors and noise. It took Jerry a minute to realize the casino didn’t have many players.

The casinos hate the show even if the hotels love it, " he told Bal-Simba as they maneuvered through the aisles and past the occasional slot player. " Most of the attendees don’t gamble-well, except for the startups and product rollouts on the show floor."

Bal-Simba nodded as if the comment made perfect sense.

The cashier’s office was off at one side of the casino so it only took about ten minutes and three sets of directions from change girls and a guard before they found it.

The cage manager was well-groomed, well-mannered and impossible to surprise. The sight of a couple of characters in Halloween costumes with a bag of gold they wanted to change into money didn’t so much as turn a hair. He laid out the terms for them as if this happened every day. Looking around the casino, Jerry reflected that maybe it did.

Ten thousand dollars maximum, " the manager told them. " Market less twenty-five percent. " He shook his head. I’ll tell you right now you can do better in most of the pawn shops."

"We need some walking-around money."

The manager shrugged. He led them around the corner, past two armed guards and into a small room where a clerk was waiting for them with a tabletop full of machinery.

The clerk was not as well groomed and considerably less mannered. He took the coins and ten by ten put them in a large piece of equipment in one corner.

"Neutron spectroscope," the manager explained. "We get a lot of Asian customers with gold."

It took time to test the coins and more time to count out the cash. In the process Jerry had to sign a statement saying who he was, that the gold was legal and that he had paid all the applicable taxes. He noticed that the manager didn’t ask them for identification.

"Now do we begin our search?" Bal-Simba asked as they threaded their way back through the casino.

"Now we go get our credentials," Jerry said. "That will take a good chunk of this money."

"Excuse me," said a woman’s voice off to one side. Both men turned and took a blinding light full in the face.

"Thanks," said a shadowy form perfunctorily as she lowered her camera and pushed by them.

Bal-Simba bunked as he tried to get his sight back. "What was that?"

"That was a reminder that we need some different clothes." Jerry frowned. "But that’s going to take more time and:" Then his rapidly returning sight fell on an arcade of shops off beyond the registration area. "Come on. It’ll be expensive, but we need to save time more than we need to save money."

The shopping arcade angled off from the registration area leading to one of the hotel towers. Beyond the frozen yogurt shop, the jeweler’s, the furrier’s and the "art gallery" selling brightly colored paintings whose kitsch was only exceeded by their prices, was the men’s store Jerry had known had to be there. The place had an Italian name that Jerry thought was some kind of sausage, but he wasn’t picky. The interior was all white and old gold and decorated in a way that for some reason reminded Jerry of a tapestry woven of polyester. The salesman was tall, lean and dressed in an extreme version of Italian style. He was also showing a five o’clock shadow.