Rick Cook: The Wizardry Cursed

Glandurg gulped. "You mean go Outside? Out into the World?"

"Well, you’re not going to find him in our tunnels are you?" Tosig snapped.

"No, I mean, of course not, but…"

The dwarf king glared and the young dwarf trailed off. Glandurg was all for adventure and travel, in the abstract. But now that he was facing the possibility of leaving the tunnels where he had lived all his 184 years, he discovered he wasn’t so sure he wanted to go.

"We’ll need supplies," he said at last. "And gold."

Tosig’s stomach flared again, but he nodded. "Anything you need. Within reason, boy! Within reason. Now, how soon can you leave?"

"I don’t know. A week perhaps."

Tosig nodded. "A week if you must, then. Sooner if you can. Our allies depend on us in this and I am depending on you."

Glandurg’s face glowed.

"Thank you, Uncle. I will strive to prove myself worthy." He bowed deeply and then whirled and raced out the door, slamming it behind him.

As the door reverberated behind his young relative, King Tosig allowed himself a tight little smile.

A debt was a debt and debts must be paid, even to trolls. On the other hand, he thought, nowhere it is written what coin they must be paid in. Clearly there must be an effort to crush this Sparrow, but if the effort failed and one of his blood relatives perished in the attempt, why, who could blame the king or his people? Even mortal magicians were not without defenses after all.

He shifted and the pain in his stomach came back, but not so bad this time. Maybe he wouldn’t need the ground chalk after all.

"Dammit, they’re stalling!" Danny said as the group picked its way along the trail in the moonlight. "They’re just keeping us hanging."

"Why?" asked Jerry. "It doesn’t get them anything."

"I dunno why," Danny said stubbornly, "but we’re being stalled."

Wiz walked beside his fellows, too tired to join the argument. Pointless anyway, he thought. No matter what their motives are we’ve got to keep negotiating with them. It’s the best we’ve got.

Behind them Ian made a tentative whimper. June quickly hushed him.

"I thought you were going to leave her home," Wiz said in an undervoice as he jerked his head back at June.

"Well, I tried," Danny said defensively. "But she came anyway. You can’t argue with her. It’s like she doesn’t hear."

"If you can’t keep her at home maybe it would be better if you didn’t come to these things."

"No way, man. This is where stuff is happening. Besides, she’s not a problem. She just sits with me." Wiz saw the angry jut of his jaw and decided to try a different approach.

"Okay, but it can’t be good for the baby to be out in this weather. And it will be even colder next full moon."

Danny’s expression cleared as he thought about it. "Yeah. You’re right. Maybe I should stay home."

Wiz nodded. The new Danny could be just as obnoxious as the know-it-all kid who had come to this world a little over a year ago, but at least you could reason with him.

More or less, Wiz reminded himself.

At the base of the enchanted hill Bal-Simba motioned the party to halt in a clearing. They clustered together while he began the chant to transport them back to the Capital on the Wizard’s Way.

A quickly spoken spell, a flash of familiar darkness and they were standing on the flagstones of the Outer Court of the Wizard’s Keep, just inside the main gates of the castle.

Wiz blinked at the brightness of the lantern-lit courtyard after the moonlit forest clearing.

"You know, this is still wrong," Jerry said as the guardsmen hurried to open the inner gate that separated the Outer Court from the Keep proper.

"Looks fine to me," Wiz said as his wife Moira came through the gate to meet him. The mellow glow of the lanterns caught the coppery highlights in her red hair and warmed the creamy tones of her freckled skin. She was easily the best thing Wiz had seen all day and he hugged her tight and kissed her soundly.

"No, think about it," Jerry persisted as Wiz and Moira broke the clinch. "We just teleported in here. But what about the velocity differences caused by the rotation of the planet? There should be a speed difference. And there’s the energy gradient, and…"

Moira’s green eyes gleamed with amusement. "Has he been like this all evening, love?"

"Just since we got back," Wiz told her.

But…" Jerry interjected.

Wiz was in no mood for one of Jerry’s attempts to apply the finer points of physics to this world. "It’s magic, okay?"

"Yeah," Jerry persisted as they went through the inner gate, "but magic has rules."

"But that doesn’t mean we understand them."

"Still…"

"Look, there are a lot weirder things about this place than some missing energy when we teleport. Let’s leave it, all right?"

Jerry looked at him sympathetically.

"You’re really beat, aren’t you?"

Wiz sighed and put his arm around Moira’s waist. "Yeah, but at least that’s over for another month. Maybe we can concentrate on writing software for a while."

"Oh, a week at least," Jerry said. "Then we’ve got a couple of other loose ends to deal with."

Wiz thought about those "loose ends" and glared at his friend. "You had to remind me, didn’t you?"

The day was bright, the air was crisp and Judith Conally was off in a world full of dragons, elves and heroes.

So Prince Leopold slays the dragon Ferocious before he meets the wood elves, she thought as the trolley car jolted to a stop in front of the San Jose Public Library. But then where does he meet Bronwyn Halfelven? It can’t be in the troll’s cave. That’s too trite. And if he kills the dragon before he confronts Gorbash F1eshripper, why does Bronwyn agree to accompany him on the quest?

She sighed and shifted on the hard fiberglass seat. Her fellow passengers ignored her. Their thoughts might not be as colorful as Judith’s, but they were just as lost in them.

Externally, Judith was no different from the other passengers. Her clothing was more comfortable than stylish and while no one would have called her ugly, they wouldn’t have called her beautiful either. Her long dark hair was lustrous, but it was caught back in a severe bun. Her figure was substantial rather than eye-catching, her jaw was square and her nose on the large side. She looked, well, ordinary.

Judith sighed again and rose with the rest of the passengers. Working out the details of a novel wasn’t nearly as easy as she had thought. Maybe she could find a solution in the book on Celtic magic the library had gotten her through interlibrary loan. If not she would have to invent something that would be magically consistent with the universe she had created.

Problems, problems. She never knew being a successful fantasy author could be this difficult.

Well, almost a successful fantasy author, she admitted as she stepped down onto the trolley platform. The outline of her trilogy had caught the eye of an editor at Nemesis Books. The sample chapters had passed muster and now the editor wanted to see the completed manuscript of the first novel.

The other passengers had stepped off the platform to cross the street in either direction, but Judith still stood there, trying to decide.

For a moment she concentrated on dragons. Not dragons as they were-quarrelsome, nasty-tempered beasts that stank of sulfur and snake-but dragons as she had first seen them. Mighty, ethereal creatures printed against the pale pink glow of clouds at earliest morning as they swooped around the tower of the Wizard’s Keep.