Rick Cook - The Wizardry Consulted

Wiz sucked in his breath when he saw the dragon coming. Doesn’t shooting a man in a parachute violate the Geneva Convention or something? He realized Ralfnir had probably never heard of the Geneva Convention and wouldn’t abide by it if he had.

Wiz watched the dragon bore in on him, looming ever larger in his vision. backslash uncommander.exe! he whispered and the spell released him, letting him fall free again. The sudden burst of speed confused Ralfnir and instead of nailing Wiz squarely, he passed several feet over Wiz’s head. As the dragon spread his wings to brake and come around again he twisted his head over his shoulder and shot a quick burst of fire at Wiz. The shot was badly aimed and missed, but it came close enough to fill Wiz’s nostrils with the reek of singed hair.

Wiz was so intent on watching Ralfnir he almost forgot to reactivate the spell. He was only a few feet off the ground when he switched it back on and hit hard enough to drive him to his knees. He barely had time to grab his staff before the dragon was on him again.

This time Ralfnir settled to the ground with two mighty wing beats that threw up so much dirt Wiz flinched away. Then slowly, ponderously, he waddled across the meadow to confront his adversary.

A quick spell reduced the friction beneath the dragon to almost nothing, but the dragon simply glided on like a skater on ice. He nearly fell into the gaping pit that opened before him, but he hopped over with a quick half-flap of his wings. Tendrils of meadow grass tugged at his feet, but the dragon broke their grip without seeming to notice. Wiz used an illusion spell to fill the meadow with duplicates of himself. Ralfnir ignored them and came straight for the real Wiz.

A basketball-sized meteor blazed out of the sky and struck the dragon squarely between the eyes. Ralfnir shook his head as if to dislodge a fly. An iceberg congealed around him and shattered instantly. Ralfnir plowed through the pile of ice shards and kept coming. Barely a dozen feet from Wiz he stopped, raised his head high over Wiz and looked down at him.

Wiz felt as if he was suffocating. The dragon’s glare seemed to press down on him like a rock on his chest. He felt his will, his magic and even his life draining away from him under the impact of those great yellow eyes.

Gasping, Wiz managed to form one more word and the world went black and freezing cold.

Ralfnir roared in rage and frustration as his prey disappeared in the rapidly expanding black cloud. He drew his head even higher and breathed a gout of flame at the spot where Wiz had been.

The resulting fireball blew Ralfnir clear across the meadow. Technically it was a misfire since the carbon black and liquid oxygen Wiz’s spell had dumped around him hadn’t had time to mix fully. However, the result was impressive enough. The carbon was very finely divided, almost monomolecular, and the liquid oxygen not only propelled the carbon black outward in all directions, shutting out light, it also made a dandy oxidizer for the carbon fuel.

Another part of the spell protected Wiz from the explosion. Ralfnir wasn’t so lucky. He lay stunned for an instant where the blast had flung him. As he rolled to his feet Wiz saw he was moving slowly, as if in pain. But he sprang into the air as agilely as ever.

This time the attack was purely magical. Again the dragon closed in on Wiz, beating and battering at him with magical blow after magical blow. Wiz was able to deflect some of them with his staff, but there were so many and they came so quickly he could not ward them all off. Under the inexorable pressure Wiz was beaten to his knees, waving his staff in one hand in an increasingly futile effort to protect himself. His chest constricted, his vision blurred and he gasped for breath, leaning on his staff to keep from falling. Ralfnir came ever closer, moving in for the final kill.

There was a sound like machine-gun fire from the edge of the meadow, four quick sharp explosions.

And Jerry was there.

And Danny.

And Moira was there.

And Bal-Simba was there.

As one the quartet raised their staffs and hurled death and destruction at the dragon bearing down on Wiz.

If he’d had time to prepare Ralfnir might have had a chance. He was an old dragon and greatly skilled in magic. But he was in the midst of battle and he was focused on Wiz with a predator’s intentness. He barely noticed the other humans before their spells hit him.

Bal-Simba was quickest off the mark. A bolt of black lightning flew from his fingertips and wrapped itself around Ralfnir. The dragon was brought up short in mid-swoop as if he had been lassoed, and he jerked violently against the sooty black bonds drawing tighter and tighter around him. The more he struggled the more closely he was held. Before the others’ spells could reach him he was already weakening and sinking toward the earth.

Jerry’s spell was an outgrowth of his speculations about the physical nature of dragons. It enclosed Ralfnir in a perfectly reflecting sphere that rapidly brought its contents to the black body temperature of a dragon. Of course, since there was no energy sink available in the sphere, the dragon died a heat death, which is sort of the thermodynamic equivalent of heat stroke.

Moira wasn’t fancy. She just threw the three worst death spells Wiz and his friends had taught her. She topped it off with the worst spell in the old magic she remembered from her days as a hedge witch-a spell guaranteed to give the victim a case of hives.

Danny’s spell was probably the most ingenious. It took all the random molecular motion in the dragon’s body and pointed it in one way-toward the highest gravity potential. What was left of Ralfnir didn’t just drop out of the sky, he hurtled with ever-increasing speed. In the space of a few hundred feet the dragon went from zero to Mach eight. Straight down.

Where he hit, Ralfnir literally left a smoking hole in the ground.

Wiz sagged against his staff and stared dumbly at the hole where the dragon had been. Then he stared at his friends coming across the meadow to him. Neither event registered very strongly.

"You shouldn’t have come," Wiz mumbled as Bal-Simba reached him slightly ahead of the others. "You weren’t supposed to come. I didn’t want you here. You’ve ruined everything."

He was still mumbling when Bal-Simba laid a huge hand on his shoulder. "Sparrow look at me," he commanded. Wiz met his eyes and his mouth dropped open. He shuddered, staggered and would have fallen if Bal-Simba had not taken his arm.

"Wha… what… ?"

"A geas," Bal-Simba said. "A magical compulsion. Laid on you, I have no doubt, by a certain dragon."

Wiz’s jaw dropped again. "Oh," he said. "So that’s…" He didn’t get a chance to finish. Moira was in his arms, kissing him and crying and all he wanted to do was hold her close forever and ever.

"Hey, Wiz," Danny said after an appropriate interval.

Wiz raised his face from Moira’s mane of copper hair. "Thanks guys. I think you just saved my life."

The giant wizard made a throw-away gesture. "It was a piece of pastry."

"That’s ’piece of cake,’ " Danny corrected.

"Whatever."

"Come on love," Moira murmured in his ear, "let us leave this place.

Wiz shook his head without taking his nose out of his wife’s hair. "I can’t just yet. There are a couple of loose ends I need to tie up here."

Moira looked over Wiz’s shoulder at Bal-Simba.

"No geas," he told her. "Only a sense of responsibility."

"Responsibility to whom?" Moira asked.

"The town council," Wiz told her.

"The town council?"