Rick Cook - The Wizardry Cursed

Instinctively he reached for the mouse and began to sketch designs on his super-workstation. More accurately, he tried to remember what the warbots in Robobattle were like. They were nice and impressive and in the game they had a lot of firepower. Then there were the giant intelligent tanks from Orc. And magic! Yeah, what would it be like to have a couple of hundred megaton/seconds of firepower and the destruction spells of a Seventh-Level Mage? That would be really something.

Working with bits and pieces from computer games, role-playing games and old television shows, Craig began to fashion his engines of destruction. It never occurred to him that he had the power to do something original.

"See?" Craig said eagerly. "I can design stuff here on the screen and then build it magically."

Mikey looked over Craig’s workstation and didn’t say anything.

"I don’t have to imagine it all in one piece. I can work on it a piece at a time, and…"

"So build me a planet buster."

"Huh?"

"Come on. Whip me up something that can blow up a whole planet." He smacked his fist into his palm. "Pow! Just like that."

"It doesn’t work that way," Craig said uncomfortably.

"Why not?"

"You’ve got to have at least a general idea of how something’s supposed to work before you can build it."

"You mean we’ve got to sit down and fucking design all this shit?"

"No, not that bad. But we’ve got to know how the stuff functions or it won’t work."

"Jesus fuckin’ Christ," Mikey muttered. "What a pile of shit."

"You wanna go back and tell them that?" Craig snapped. "I sure as hell ain’t gonna."

Mikey grinned in that nasty, superior way of his. "Maybe I will do that the next time I talk to them."

Craig’s jaw dropped. "You’ve been talking to them?"

"They’re around, if you want to make contact."

"But Jesus, I mean…"

"They’re real interesting too. I’m learning a lot from them."

The way he said it made Craig uncomfortable. "You mean magic and stuff?"

Mikey grinned again. "Oh, I’m learning lots of things."

Craig knew he needed to learn more about how magic operated, but the thought of even seeing an Ur-elf again made him weak in the knees.

"Look, suppose you concentrate on the theoretical stuff and I’ll keep working on the robots and shit."

"Okay," Mikey said with a little smile. Craig had the uneasy feeling he’d been outmaneuvered again.

Mikey stopped at the doorway and turned back to Craig. "Oh, if you want to do something useful, redesign this fucking castle and make it more livable."

Okay, Craig thought, turning back to his workstation and away from thoughts of Ur-elves and magical theory. Let’s really turn this sucker into something!

Craig stood at the topmost point of the highest tower, surveyed his work and found it good.

The skimpy, saggy little castle they had formed out of pure magic was long gone. Now the entire top of the mountain had been terraced and leveled. What had been the original castle was now just the central piece of an elaborate structure. Even it was much changed.

Caermort-the Castle of Death, he thought. That’s what we’ll call it.

It certainly looked deadly enough. Energy cannons poked their ugly snouts out of domed turrets on the stone ramparts. The central tower of gleaming steel soared to neck-craning height, glittering like a mirror in the afternoon sun. Several of the courtyards had been roofed over with domes of crystal. Random bolts of lightning flew between towers and played over the domes. Further up the air sparkled and flickered as the protective magical shell around the castle interacted with random dust motes which were wafted into it.

Within the castle itself hordes of servants, robots and living creatures hurried to do his bidding. In the caves dug into the mountain giant robots worked with monster tools to assemble more of their kind and other engines of destruction to boot.

It still wasn’t absolutely perfect, he admitted modestly. If he did not work a thing up in complete detail on his screen the details were likely to be filled in haphazardly.

But all in all it was a marvelous engine of destruction. All this power aimed at a single goal. Conquest. Already his drones scouted the limits of this world and his robot legions formed in the huge caverns beneath the mountain or exercised on the desert plains. Mikey might sneer, but he’d stop when Craig’s mechanical armies marched across the border between the worlds.

The border between both worlds, he amended silently. Why limit himself to the one where magic worked? There was no army on Earth that could stand against his creations.

Better to be Lord of Three Worlds, than Lord of Two, he decided.

The programming team was up to its elbows in source code when Arianne came into their workroom.

"Forgive me, my Lords, my Lady," the tall blonde lady said as she entered the room. "Are you occupied?"

Wiz turned toward the door. "Occupied, but not super busy. What’s up?"

"Bal-Simba sent me to request your presence."

"Sure. In his office?"

"At Oak Island off the south coast. A strange thing has washed ashore at the village. Bal-Simba asks that you examine it."

Wiz looked over at the pile of scrolls and the shimmering letters hanging above his desk and paused. A summons to meet Bal-Simba here was one thing. A jaunt to a distant village to look at something was another matter. Even walking the Wizard’s Way, such a trip would probably eat the rest of the day.

"Can’t we just send one of our searching units?" he asked. "We do have to get this stuff done before-"

Arianne hesitated. "Lord, I think you had better see this personally."

"What is it?"

"We do not know. But from the description I think it owes more to your world than ours."

Wiz smelled salt and mud. They were in a hollow between two sand dunes. Gray-green sand grasses and little twisted shrubs grew here and there around them and even in this sheltered spot a breeze ruffled the vegetation and their clothing.

There was a man waiting for them, a rough, grizzled fellow dressed in the bulky knit sweater and canvas trousers favored by the folk who made their living upon the Freshened Sea.

"My Lords, welcome," he said, bowing perfunctorily, as if unused to the exercise. "I am Weinrich, the mayor of Oak Island."

Moira curtsied and the rest bowed. "Well met, Lord. I am Moira and these are the wizards Sparrow, Jerry and Danny."

Weinrich’s face cleared, as if a burden had been lifted from him.

"Ah, well met indeed. They said you might come."

"Well, we’re here," Wiz said a trace sharply. "Let’s see the thing that’s causing all the fuss."

With the growing importance of Wiz’s new magic, and the spreading word that he was from beyond the World, there was a growing tendency to ascribe anything out of the ordinary to the new magic. Normally Arianne and Bal-Simba did not take the villagers’ reports this seriously, still…

As they climbed the dune Wiz saw four dragons flying complex figure eight patterns off the beach, obviously on guard.

"If this is another piece of driftwood," he muttered to Jerry as they toiled up the sand dune, "I’ll…"

Then he came over the rise and saw what was down on the beach.

The villagers had dragged it further up the beach, above the tide line. Now they clustered in knots at a respectful distance.