Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

"Act inconspicuous," Jerry hissed "Us they can arrest."

Bal-Simba leaned nonchalantly against the side of the building. The effect wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, but it wasn’t that out of place either. The best thing Moira could think of was to get out of there. Since that accorded perfectly with the dragon’s instincts, she had no trouble commanding the body to run. Moira put her head down and galloped straight at the crowd.

One spectator decided this was the Las Vegas version of the running of the bulls and stepped in front of her waving a jacket with a red lining like a bullfighter’s cape. For his pains he got thrown nearly ten feet by a quick toss of the dragon’s head. No one else seemed disposed to follow, not even the police.

Jerry nodded to Bal-Simba and the two of them drifted off around the other side of the building. Once they were out of sight they ran after the disappearing dragon.

They found Moira in an alley a block and a half away, leaning against a fence, her sides heaving.

"Are you all right?" Jerry asked.

With an effort Moira raised the dragon’s drooping head "I am sorry, My Lord I could not control this body."

Jerry looked back at the glow from the burning police car. "Well, thank God no one was killed. Now come on."

They made their way down the alley and paused in the shadows at the next cross street until there were no cars coming. Then the two men and the dragon sprinted across the street and into the next alley. They did it twice more before they ran out of alley at the blank rear wall of an apartment building.

"I take it we are not yet out of danger," Bal-Simba said as they made their way back to the mouth of the alley.

"They’ll be searching the whole city for us and we’re not exactly going to be hard to spot. We can’t keep walking around, not with the cops looking for Moira."

"Is there someplace we can hide?"

"Well, we could stash her among the life-size animated dinosaurs in the Las Vegas Museum of Natural History, but we’d have to get her there first." Jerry frowned. Then his frown cleared and he looked past Bal-Simba out of the mouth of the alley.

"Wait a minute. I think I see the answer to our problem."

The guy at the truck rental place was remarkably uninterested in his customers. All he wanted was a driver’s license and a cash deposit. Fortunately Jerry’s California license hadn’t expired yet. Gotta find some way to get that renewed, he thought.

"Just make sure you bring it back clean," the clerk said dubiously, eyeing the dragon.

"Don’t worry, she’s housebroken," Jerry assured him. Moira only sniffed. In just a few minutes the contract was signed, Moira was loaded into the back of a twenty-four-foot truck with the slogan "Land of Enchantment" and a picture of New Mexico scenery painted on the side.

"Well, that’s one less problem anyway," Jerry said, as he watched a police car cruise by in the opposite direction.

"Now what?" asked Bal-Simba, who was hunched down on the passenger’s side. Jerry glanced at the time display in front of a bank. "It’s too late to do much tonight. We’ll have to get some sleep and try again in the morning."

"At least this place has many inns," Bal-Simba said as he looked at the row of neon signs stretching away before them.

"Forget it. You can’t get a hotel room in this town this week for love or money." He paused. "Well, maybe for love, but you’ve got to rent it by the hour and, come to think of it, that’s for money too."

Bal-Simba looked at him. "I take it that is not practical"

"Most working girls don’t like threesomes and if we try to bring a dragon into the scene-well, yeah it’s not practical"

The watch commander for the police department was having a hard night as well. Except he knew where he was going to be spending most of it.

Take over, " he said to his sergeant as he picked up his hat. " I’m going to the scene."

"What do you want me to do about this thing in the meantime?" his sergeant asked.

"Nothing. We’re not doing anything until I debrief those officers and find out just exactly what the hell we’re dealing with here."

The watch commander knew his men and he trusted them-within broad limits. However, whatever this was pretty clearly went beyond those limits. Obviously something had happened at that mini-market, but equally obviously there was some sort of failure of communication. He was not about to put out an APB for a mythical creature until he’d had a good long talk with the officers and the witnesses.

In the event that proved more difficult than he had anticipated. No one in the crowd would admit to seeing anything, the clerk in the mini-mart could suddenly only communicate in an obscure dialect of Farsi and the tourists in the Mini-Winnie were still hysterical. The physical evidence was impressive enough, what with the burned-out police car and the scorched and dented motorhome, not to mention the scrapes and bruises on the officers who had been knocked around. The testimony of the officers was more equivocal. None of them really liked the idea of what they had seen, or thought they had seen, so they were very careful in their descriptions. The watch commander collected numerous statements about the poor light in the parking lot, the stress of the encounter, the lack of a good view and such. But of the nine officers present not one of them used the word "dragon."

It was nearly dawn when the watch commander decided that the official story was going to be that someone had a large alligator that was causing trouble. That’s the way it went down on the blotter and incident report where the media would see it. Privately and unofficially he passed the word to the next watch commander and left it to him to pass the word privately and unofficially to his officers. It wasn’t the first time that the official version and the truth had differed significantly in this town.

Jerry, Bal-Simba and Moira spent a miserable night parked in a patch of desert a few miles out of town. Moira slept in the back of the truck, Jerry curled up in some old moving pads underneath and Bal-Simba tried to sleep in the cab. Moira was too sick to sleep well and the others were too uncomfortable. The November desert at night is bone-chillingly cold and Jerry kept thinking about scorpions. Wiz and the other humans awoke that morning stiff and sore from another night sleeping on the rocks. At least the humans awoke stiff and sore. Glandurg seemed as relaxed and fresh as ever.

Fresh was definitely something the rest of the party wasn’t. Wiz wondered why dungeon-delving games never said anything about what the participants smelled like after a couple of days of hard work and no baths.

After a quick breakfast of vegetable porridge everyone crowded around Wiz while he checked the locator crystal

"It says we go off this way," Wiz told the others.

"How close are we?" Malkin asked.

Wiz looked back down at the crystal and frowned. "Still a ways to go." Danny looked down at the glowing object in Wiz’s hand "It doesn’t seem any brighter than it was when we started. Shouldn’t it get brighter as we get closer?"

"We still have some distance to cover. These caverns are big."

"Are you sure this thing knows where it’s going?" Danny grumbled.

"It’s set to home in on Moira," Wiz replied with more confidence than he felt. He was developing a nagging suspicion about where the magical compass was leading them. Either these caverns were much bigger than he remembered them or they were being taken on the scenic route. Considering all the stuff they’d run into so far that was a distinct possibility.