Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

Instantly a little demon with a green eyeshade popped into existence. Jerry noticed it was rounder than the ones he was used to. In fact it looked a lot like Malus himself.

"?" the demon said.

"list compiler exe," Malus pronounced, and the demon removed a quill pen from behind a large bat-like ear and began to scribble lines of fiery letters in the air.

The compiler was big and took a while. By now several other wizards, had gathered around to watch.

"Shall I list out the libraries and include files as well, My Lord?" Malus asked when the Emac at last completed its task.

"No, this is fine for now," Jerry told him. "Emac." he commanded, and proceeded to order the demon to list out the compiler again. Taj watched closely, but aside from the fact that Malus’ Emac wrote in letters of golden fire and Jerry’s preferred electric blue he couldn’t see any difference.

"Now," he said, as the second demon finished.

"Emac."

The blue fire superimposed itself on the yellow. Suddenly several sections of the code stood out in brilliant green.

"Your version of the spell compiler. It’s different." Jerry checked the changed sections against Malus’ spell. "Your spell didn’t work because something messed with your copy of the compiler. The program was fine but the tool was broken."

"But, My Lord, I can assure you I have done nothing to change it!"

"I believe you," Jerry said. And, he didn’t add aloud, that’s what scares me. A quick check of the other wizards present in the day room showed that two of them had compilers which had suffered minor changes, but none so great as Malus’.

"I wonder how many other broken copies of the compiler are loose around the castle? Or broken anything else?" Jerry said as the last wizard in the group checked out clean. "I think we’d better start a sweep of the software."

"You go ahead," Taj told him. "I’ve got some stuff I want to check up on." Jerry was so engrossed in the problem he only nodded, forgetting his objections to Taj going out on his own.

"Well," Jerry said tiredly a few hours later, "we were lucky. So far we’ve only turned up a half-dozen infected programs." He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. "Maybe more than lucky. We didn’t exactly build the spells to be virus-proof but we were real conservative in our design. There’s an error-correcting code built into every spell and if the check sums and such don’t match it won’t execute. Plus the critical stuff uses triple redundancy."

"I noticed," Taj said. "Is there any pattern to what’s been attacked?"

"Not that I can find. There’s a lot of stuff here that’s been nibbled around the edges but aside from Malus’ copy of the compiler nothing else serious is really broken. Damn! I wish Wiz and Danny were here."

"Need some more insights, eh?"

"That’s part of it. But now I’m going to have to go through and design anti-virus software to protect every spell we’ve got. It would be easier if there were three of us doing it."

Taj looked at the changed code again. "Who’s writing these puppies?" Jerry shrugged. "If I had to guess I’d say it’s our enemy in the City of Night."

"Seems kind of piddly for a deliberate attack. Are you sure none of your students worked these up?"

Jerry shook his head. "You don’t understand how seriously these people take magic. This isn’t like a bunch of bored high school lads or out-of-work Bulgarians. Everyone here respects magic too much to do something like this for the hell or it."

Taj looked skeptical. "This thing came from somewhere."

"Yeah," Jerry said. "And that’s what worries me. One more thing that worries me."

Moira rose dripping from the bath. The water streamed off, making little rivulets between her shoulder-blades and breasts, splitting at her swelling belly and dripping off her sparse orange thatch of pubic hair. She stepped out onto the tiled floor and a skeletal hand offered her a towel.

She accepted it without noticing either her attendant’s appearance or smell. In life the zombie maid had been a harem attendant for a mighty wizard of the Dark League. She had died on the surface when her master’s palace collapsed and had lain there until the new master of the City of Night had claimed her. Even in this cold land, decay had set in while she lay dead on the surface and now that she was often in the steamy atmosphere of the bath her rotting flesh seethed with maggots.

Neither sight nor smell mattered to Moira’s body or the intelligence that animated it. Bathing was necessary for human health, so Moira bathed, fallowing barely remembered rituals gleamed from the dead brains of its other servants. In the same way the body was fed, exercised and rested, cared for as a brood mare is cared for. Not for the sake of the body, but for the sake of what it would bear. Or more correctly, what would be torn from it at the proper time, since natural childbirth played no more role in the Enemy’s plans than did a normal child.

Oblivious, unseeing and uncaring, Moira finished rubbing herself down and accepted the shift and long, fur-lined black robe from her shambling attendant. Then she sat as the decaying creature tenderly but clumsily pulled on her boots. Warmth is important to human health as well.

"Okay," E. T. Tajikawa said, "there’s part of your problem."

Jerry, Bal-Simba and Moira all crowded around the table. Jerry squinted at the glowing letters over the Tajmanian Devil’s desk. Some of them were the conventional magic notation used for writing spells in the code compilers. Others were odd symbols he had never seen before. The result made no sense at all.

Squatting underneath was the demon the code fragment manifested.

It had a nasty sneer on its face-or at least on its top, Jerry amended. The thing sat on six spindly legs like a demented version of a Lunar Lander. The main body was cylindrical and semi-transparent. Inside were vague outlines of something coiled into a long spiral. The top, where the face was, was a regular geometric solid, a dodecahedron, he realized after making a quick count of the edges on each surface.

"What the heck is it?"

"It’s a virus," Taj told him. "You’ve got an infection in your system."

"Holy shit," Jerry breathed. "But how?"

Taj just shrugged.

Jerry tore his eyes away from the demon and examined the spell more closely.

"Does that make any sense to you?" Taj asked.

Jerry just shook his head. "For one thing it’s not entirely in standard magic notation. More than that, well, it just doesn’t make a Tot of sense. What does it do?"

"It attaches itself to a spell and starts shifting instructions around or combining them."

Jerry bit his lower lip. There was something terribly wrong with this but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what yet.

"Could it be a weapon?"

"If it is it’s a piss-poor one. The thing’s not very destructive and it’s hardly hidden at all. It doesn’t poly-morph and if you know the sequence you can grep it out of any spell it’s in."

Everyone was silent for a moment.

"There’s something not right about this," Jerry said

That appears to be an understatement," Bal-Simba said mildly.

"No, I mean there’s something really wrong here. Something we’re missing." Moira cocked her serpent-like head. "Another of your premonitions?"

"More like a feeling, but yeah. That sort of thing."