Rick Cook - The Wizardry Consulted

"Yeah, I’m a consultant to them on dragon problems."

"Sparrow," the giant black wizard rumbled, "I am almost afraid to ask what you have been doing."

"Well," Wiz admitted, "it’s kind of complicated."

Bal-Simba eyed his friend. "Now I am afraid to ask."

"I’ll explain it to you when we get back to town," he said. "It’s really not that bad." Then he stopped. "At least it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s not dangerous." He stopped again. "Well, okay, there are these three thugs who were trying to kill me and a couple of people on the council who want my hide. And I guess Pieter, the guy in the cement overcoat who’s standing in the town square, is going to come looking for me once he gets unfrozen. But it’s really not that bad." He realized all four of his companions were staring at him, hard. "Honest," he finished lamely.

"You had best tell us about it when we get back to town," Bal-Simba said.

"Uh, I’ve got to make a kind of a detour first." Wiz looked over his shoulder at the trickle of smoke coming from the fresh crater in the sod. He took a deep breath.

"Okay, now for the hard part."

Again Wiz Zumwalt faced the assembled dragons. This time he had arrived under his own power along the Wizard’s Way. He had come alone, but Bal-Simba and the others were watching him closely.

This meeting being called on short notice, there weren’t as many dragons along the walls of the canyon as there had been the day before. But there were still a satisfying number.

"Well," he said to the mass of monsters, "you’ve had your taste of the new magic. Satisfied?"

"It was not a fair duel," one of the dragons complained. "You had help from others of your kind."

"Not fair at all," Wiz agreed cheerfully. "But then you’re not going to get a fair fight with a human. Don’t you see? Humans cooperate. They work together naturally." He thought of the town council. "Maybe not always easily and not always well, but they manage to do it."

He threw his head back to look up at the assembled dragons and raised his voice so his words echoed off the cliffs. "It won’t be one dragon against one human. It will be one or a few dragons against every human in sight. And most of the time the humans will win with the new magic."

There was a great shifting and slithering as the dragons absorbed the idea.

"Then we should kill you all now," a voice rang harshly in his head.

"You could try," he said levelly. "But there are many more humans than there are in this valley and a lot of them already have the new magic. Even if you got every human in the valley, others would replace them."

More shifting and slithering.

"What do you propose then?" a new voice asked.

"Simple. You’re going to make a treaty with the people in the valley. And this time you’re going to abide by it." He turned round to face the mass of assembled dragons. "All of you."

"And how shall we bind all dragonkind by our agreement?" a "voice" like an iron kettledrum asked.

"That’s your problem. Maybe the seniors could take turns patrolling the border. But you’re going to solve it or in a few generations there won’t be any dragons left in the Dragon Lands."

He looked up at the assembled monsters. "Think it over," he said. Then he turned on his heel and left.

It wasn’t yet noon but the group was worn out by the time they returned to the house. They were too tired to walk so they took the Wizard’s Way back and popped into the front hall just as Anna came up the stairs from the kitchen.

She wasn’t the least fazed by the apparition in her front hall. These were wizards, wizards did strange things, therefore anything wizards did was normal. She merely curtseyed.

"Will there be anything you need, My Lord?" she said to Wiz. As usual Anna looked utterly charming in a brown work dress and dirty apron. There was a smear of soot on her cheek just below one china blue eye and blond curls peeked out from the kerchief that protected her hair.

"No, nothing now, thank you," Wiz said. "There’s ale in the keg in the kitchen isn’t there? We’ll probably be down there for a while."

Anna curtseyed again. "I’ll finish preparing the guest rooms, then, My Lord." With that she turned and hurried up the stairs, oblivious to Moira’s eyes boring into her back.

"Who," Moira demanded, "is she?"

"That’s Anna. She’s my housekeeper."

The red-haired witch fixed him with a fishy eye. "Your house had better be all she has been keeping, My Lord."

In the event the explanation in the kitchen took somewhat longer than Wiz had anticipated. About three hours, in fact, by the time he answered all the questions, straightened out everyone’s chronology, found out about Judith’s troubles with the FBI, and gave Jerry and Danny a very detailed and highly technical explanation about exactly how to gimmick an Internet router.

"What do you intend to do about this Pieter, the one you left in town square?" Bal-Simba asked when he finally ran down.

"Well," Wiz said, "I don’t suppose it would be really right to leave the little oinker frozen for all eternity." He sighed with genuine regret. "So I guess I’ll have to take the spell off him."

"I would suggest doing it the last thing ere we leave the town," Bal-Simba said. "Otherwise he will like as not try to attack you again."

"Oh, I wasn’t thinking of being around at all," Wiz said. "I figured I’d create a timer demon to unfreeze him after we’ve left."

"Wise," Bal-Simba nodded.

"I was thinking of having the demon unfreeze him-oh, I dunno, say at high noon on the next market day. The square should be nice and crowded about then."

"That’s nasty," Danny said. "I really like it."

"You get that way when you play consultant," Wiz grinned back. "That and hanging around politicians." He snapped his fingers. "Speaking of which, I’d better get down there and set up the spell. Don’t want to leave it to the last minute. Also I’ve got an errand to run at the town hall."

Bal-Simba cocked an eyebrow. "More consulting?"

"No," Wiz told him as he stood up from the table, "I’ve got to see a man about a house."

Wiz’s errand at the town hall took somewhat longer than he had expected. But not nearly as long as it would take in Cupertino, he thought as he pushed his front door open. The council may have had politics down to a blood sport but at least they hadn’t invented lawyers yet. As part of his efforts to gum up the works Wiz had considered introducing them to the concept, but he had saved it as an emergency tactic if things really got dire. Common decency if nothing else, he thought. Llewllyn hadn’t been in his office at the town hall and Wiz was just as glad.

As he tugged the front door closed Malkin came up from the kitchen.

"Where is everyone?" he asked as she reached his floor.

"Oh they’re around," she said breezily. "Your wife’s down in the kitchen, ’helping’ Anna."

" ’Helping’?"