Rick Cook - The Wizardry Cursed

As "Wiz" and the others came into the room Jerry squinted at him.

"Gee, it really isn’t you, is it? I can’t tell even this close."

"Let us hope no one else can either."

Bal-Simba reached out and clapped the image on the shoulder. Then he grinned broadly at Arianne, showing all his pointed teeth.

"It even feels right! A work of art, Lady."

The usually unemotional wizardess dimpled and dropped a curtsey in return.

One of the other blue robes, a lean man with thinning dark hair named Juvian, bustled forward. "Everything you see and hear will be recorded." He tapped the glowing blue sphere he held in his palm. "It will not be necessary to stare or to overtly memorize anything. Keep your eyes moving and try to see as much as you possibly can."

Arianne stepped up beside him. "You know the recall signal. Use it at any sign of danger. We will be watching and if we see anything we will pull you back." She laid a hand on his shoulder and her brown eyes bored into his.

"Remember Sparrow, even though your body remains here you can be hurt. Do not become careless."

Wiz gulped and nodded.

A flash of darkness and Wiz found "himself" standing in front of the huge gate of the castle.

The doors were gigantic. Throwing his head back and squinting up, Wiz estimated they were at least a hundred feet high. They were made of some greenish metal with a zig-zag crack down the center where they met. The portal they were set in was made of some smooth pale blue substance with softly rounded forms and no joints anywhere, as if it and the walls of the castle had been cast in a single piece. The whole thing reminded Wiz of something out of a 1930s’ comic strip.

There was no sign of a knocker or a doorbell. He thought about knocking, but if the thing was as thick as it looked he doubted he would be heard inside.

Well, nothing ventured…

He stepped up to the door and pounded three times with his fist. The door boomed and rang from the blows in a way that made Wiz’s whole body shiver.

For a minute nothing happened. Then he stepped back from the door and a motion on the portal caught his attention.

What he had taken as parts of the rounded decoration were futuristic gun turrets. The barrels poking out of the turrets were equally futuristic, with cooling fins and streamlined muzzle brakes. There were at least six of them and all of them were pointing directly at him.

Okay, so now they know I’m here. He decided the best thing to do was to act nonchalant, as if he went calling on strange castles every day. He thought about trying to whistle, but he wasn’t sure he could. So he settled for folding his arms and looking around.

Around him the red sand desert stretched away in gentle folds. The landscape was dotted here and there with dark green spindly bushes and an occasional clump of something that looked like it might have been cactus if it had known what a cactus was supposed to be. The sun was high in the sky and the reflection off the greenish metal of the gates was enough to make him squint.

Oddly, when you got this close to it the castle wasn’t very impressive. Standing next to it was like standing next to a mountain instead of something manmade. Even the gate was huge and impersonal. Somehow that made it less imposing, not more.

Well, it’s not their taste in architecture I’m concerned about.

Wiz couldn’t sense temperature very well through the simulacrum, but the glare of the sun and the bright reflection off the gate told him it had to be hot out here. He wondered if he was sweating.

Then the door started to move. Wiz opened his mouth and nearly choked on his carefully prepared greeting when he saw what was behind it.

The robot was eight feet tall with glowing red eyes and a glossy black skin. It was human-shaped, but it wasn’t what Wiz would call reassuring.

"You rannggg?" it asked in a voice like the bell of doom. It would have been even more impressive if the robot had been talking to the visitor instead of the gatepost.

Wiz dredged up the last of his nonchalance. "Yeah. I’m Wiz Zumwalt and I’m here to see the boss."

The robot paused as if considering the information. A crackling blue nimbus played over its head and down its right shoulder.

"Commeee," it commanded.

The head cocked to one side and jerked upright. The arms jerked up, elbows bent, bringing the hands to shoulder level. The robot spun on its heel, nearly lunged into the gate, recovered and strode off, weaving from side to side like a drunken sailor.

"Lead on, Lurch," Wiz said to the robot’s departing back, then hurried after him. The guns tried to track him even inside the portal.

The hall beyond the gate was so gargantuan that Wiz couldn’t make out the other end. High above shafts of sunlight washed down through the haze that hid the ceiling.

A rather thick haze, Wiz noticed as he strode along after his jerking, zig-zagging guide. It wasn’t just that the place was big, it needed a good vacuuming. He noticed that both he and the robot were leaving footprints in the film of reddish dust on the marble tiled floor.

After a few hundred yards they turned off into a side corridor. Its proportions were more to human scale, but it was round and a trickle of water down the center made the going harder. The robot splashed along unconcerned, but Wiz tried to keep his feet dry by staying to the side. He had to hurry even more to keep up with the robot.

Even though Wiz’s temperature sense didn’t work very well, it was so cold he shivered a bit. The metal walls of the tunnel were filmed with condensation which trickled down and accumulated at the bottom of the corridor.

That’s where the water comes from, he thought. They need a little work on their climate control system. He looked down at the water in the center of the tunnel and saw it was slimed with green algae.

Not to mention their housekeeping.

A short way down the corridor was a door, round and massive like a bank vault’s. The robot stopped short and waited as Wiz came up beside him.

Just as Wiz reached the robot the door popped open and clanged against the corridor wall. Wiz jumped back to keep from being crushed. His guide remained impassive even though the door missed him by a fraction of an inch.

A few other little things they need work on, too. As he set off in pursuit of the robot he wondered if that was supposed to have been an automated door opener or a man trap.

Another few hundred feet brought them to a bank of elevators that looked like something out of a New York office building-if you ignored the remote-controlled machine guns covering the lobby and the gargoyles perched over the elevator doors.

After a brief wait one set of doors banged open and Wiz and the robot stepped into an elevator-more accurately, they stepped down into an elevator, since the car had stopped about a foot below the floor.

It took a long, long time to reach the top. Wiz wasn’t sure whether that was because they were going so high or because the elevator worked about as well as the robot guide. They jerked, lurched, sputtered, speeded up and slowed down until Wiz lost all sense of how far they had come. He wasn’t even too sure they had gone straight up.

At last the doors flew open and they stepped out into another corridor. This one was broad and clean, at least. The floor was tiled in jade-green material, the walls were malachite and the ceilings and wall decorations were in polished gold. It was like being inside a Faberge Easter egg and it removed any last lingering doubts Wiz might have had about his hosts’ taste.

The robot lurched drunkenly down the corridor and caromed off the wall, knocking off chips of malachite and bending a golden wall sconce.