Rick Cook - The Wizardry Cursed

Off to one side the village hedge witch conferred nervously with a blue-robed wizard of the Mighty. Occasionally he would look over at the thing as if to make certain it had not moved under its own power.

It was worth looking at, Wiz had to admit. To the fisherfolk of this isolated island it must have seemed strange beyond all imagining.

One wing was crumpled under it and the other canted into the air. The front of the body was stove in, apparently from hitting the water. As they got closer Wiz could smell the sharp chemical reek of gasoline.

"An airplane," Danny said.

"Perhaps, but there is magic here as well," Moira said.

Wiz didn’t have his wife’s nose for magic, so he fished out the magic detector he carried in his pouch. The crystal glowed a strong green as he pointed it at the craft.

Magic all right. But gasoline as well. He felt the hair begin to rise on his neck. Whatever this thing was, it was very, very wrong.

"Moira, you and the others stay back. Jerry and I will go in for a closer look."

Moira nodded. "Be careful, love."

"Very careful."

Wiz and Jerry half-stumbled, half-slid down the seaward face of the dune, oblivious to the sand that was trickling into their shoes. As they got onto the beach, they split up. Wiz approached from the tail and Jerry eased toward the crushed nose. There was no sign of movement.

The sea breeze swished through the grasses at the edge of the beach, drowning out the villagers’ whispers and dulling the wizards’ conversation to an unintelligible murmur.

"Look at this!" Jerry called. "It’s got a gasoline engine."

As Wiz ducked under the wing of the plane to join him, Jerry reached out and gave the cowling fasteners an expert twist. Then he flipped the cowling back to expose the power plant.

"High output two-stroke," he said looking it over. "That thing probably puts out ninety horses in spite of its size." He looked further. "No muffler. If that thing was a two-stroke the villagers should have heard it coming for miles."

"It had to be running," Wiz said. "But that’s impossible."

"Maybe not," Jerry pointed to the front of the plane. "Look at the prop. Only one blade bent. That means it wasn’t turning when it went in."

Wiz knelt down beside the propeller. "If it crashed here it’s not surprising. That engine couldn’t possibly run in this World."

"Do you think it was sucked through from our world?"

Wiz shrugged. "Maybe, but how? And why? Anyway, the thing’s obviously not dangerous now. Let’s get the others down here."

Moira and Danny quickly joined them at the wreck. The other wizards kept their distance.

"It’s our technology, all right," Wiz said as the others came up. "No cockpit, so it was a drone of some kind."

"What about the magic?" Moira asked.

Wiz looked at his magic detector. "That seems to be concentrated in the boxes in the mid-section."

"If I didn’t know better I’d say that was an instrument bay," Jerry said, ducking under the up-tilted wing and squatting down beside it.

"Don’t be too sure you know better."

Jerry popped the fasteners and lifted the covering. Inside was a wild tangle of wires and printed circuit boards leading back to several oddly carved lumps of pearl-gray material.

"Cute," Jerry said at last. "Some of this stuff is obviously electronic, but the guts of it," he pointed to the pearl-gray lumps, "are obviously magical."

"We can probably untangle the electronics, but the magic?" He looked over at Moira.

"That is likely to be difficult, my Lord. We do not know who made those things or what they are supposed to do." She frowned and concentrated. "I can tell you that the spells are most powerful, however."

"So the magic’s fine," Jerry summed up. "It’s the engine that doesn’t work."

"Of course the engine doesn’t work," Wiz said irritably. "It couldn’t work here. The whole thing’s impossible."

"Oh yeah?" Danny retorted. "Take a look at those exhaust pipes."

Wiz followed Danny’s pointing finger and saw that the pipes were discolored where they came out of the cylinders.

"Heat did that. That sucker ran and it ran for a while."

"But if the engine worked, then the guidance system and the imaging stuff wouldn’t. They’re based on magic."

"Wait a minute," Wiz said. "Let me try something. emac!" he commanded.

"?"

"list"

The Emac took the quill from behind his ear and scribbled furiously in the air. Lines of fiery symbols appeared and scrolled upward from the Emac.

"carat S" Wiz pronounced and the Emac froze in mid-line.

"Hey, I recognize that!" Wiz peered closely at the glowing letters of fire. "Not only are they magic, they’re our magic. These spells were written with our magic compiler or something damn like it."

Four pairs of eyes met over the wreckage and no one said anything.

"This will do," Glandurg puffed, looking around the grove.

"High time too," Thorfin wheezed, coming up behind him nearly bent double by the climb and the weight of the enormous pack he carried.

One by one the other dwarves filed into the clearing and dumped their packs. The griffins had left them off at dawn on the other side of the forest and they had been walking ever since. The wooded land was a collection of craggy hills cut by little valleys and laced with brooks and streams. Generations of firewood gathering by mortals had left the woods open and parklike under the spreading trees, but it was still hard going, even for dwarves.

Glandurg had led his band almost entirely through the forest to a wooded bluff overlooking the river that ran by the base of the Capital mount. Just a few hundred yards and a stretch of placid water now separated the dwarves from the enormous bluff that bore the capital city of the North on its back and the Wizard’s Keep at its very tip.

As his followers rested behind him, Glandurg surveyed the scene. From here they could watch the Wizard’s Keep and the comings and goings of their quarry and stay concealed in the forest. A perfect spot to plan an ambush.

"How are we supposed to know this wizard when we find him?" Gimli asked from where he lay against his pack under a spreading tree. "Mortals all look alike."

"No they don’t," Snorri said with a superior air. "There’s men mortals and there’s women mortals. You can tell them apart easy."

"That only cuts it down by half," Gimli said. "We can’t go around killing all the male mortals we meet, can we?"

Glandurg turned back to his band. "That will not be necessary," he said loftily. "I thought of this before we left and I obtained from my uncle the King a means to infallibly identify this mortal."

He drew from his pouch a handful of hazelnut-sized lumps. "Each of you will have one of these. They will always point the way to this foreign sorcerer, be he a hundred leagues away."

Each of the dwarves came forward and took one of the seekers from his hand.

"It’s dark," said Thorfin, staring into his palm.

"Mine’s not pointing any way at all," Snorri chimed in.

Glandurg scowled and grabbed for the more powerful version of the device that hung around his own neck. Cupping his hands to shield it from the light he saw that it glowed only very dimly. The arrow within pointed waveringly south.