Rick Cook - The Wizardry Cursed

"So at the first sign of trouble you slip on the ring and turn into a statue?"

"Well, no. We wear the rings all the time. They activate automatically when you’re under direct attack and they stay active as long as you’re in danger. The rest of the time they’re inert."

"These things are like bullet-proof vests?" asked Jerry.

"More like an airbag in a car. Nothing happens until you need it."

Wiz passed the rings around and each of them slipped one on. Then Danny turned and held one out to June. But she hissed and shrank away as if Danny had offered her a scorpion.

"June, please." But June’s face was white and she refused to touch the ring.

"It is not like the enchantment in the elf hill," Moira said, coming over to her and laying a hand on her arm. "It will serve only to protect you." Still June shook her head and turned away.

Danny held up his hand to display the ring he was wearing. "Look, if I wear this and you don’t, we’ll be separated if something happens. But if we both wear one we’ll always be together. Please darling, wear it for me."

Hesitantly June reached out a shaking hand and clutched the ring Danny extended to her. With a sudden move she jammed the ring onto her finger and then jerked her hands back into the folds of her skirt. Danny grabbed her and hugged her to him.

"Oh yeah, I almost forgot," Wiz said a shade too brightly. "There’s another way to turn the ring on and off."

He held up his hand and mimed twisting the stone. "If you want you can activate the spell by turning the stone in the ring a quarter turn to the right. You can deactivate the spell in the presence of danger by having someone turn the stone a quarter turn to the left."

"What kind of a moron would want to turn off the spell when he’s in danger?" Danny asked.

Wiz stopped short. "You know, I never thought of that."

"Feeping creatureism," Jerry said.

"What kind of creature?" Moira asked.

"A feeping one," Danny explained. "That’s one that has too feeping many…"

"What it means is that I’ve added features just to add features," Wiz interrupted. "It’s a spoonerism on featurism."

"If you expect me to ask you about spoons, my Lord, you will be sorely disappointed. Nevertheless I understand the idea."

"Yeah," Wiz said sadly, "and that took more work than all the rest of the spell put together."

"So now we can continue to work even under the strongest magical attack?" Moira asked, eager to get the conversation back to something that halfway made sense.

"Not under actual attack, but right up to the minute it begins."

Moira looked down at the ring on her finger. "I hope it works."

"I hope we never find out," Jerry said fervently.

The drone had come so far south only by accident, cut off from its base by a line of strong thunderstorms and blown well past the point where it should have turned for home. Nevertheless it kept recording what its sensors recorded and transmitting it back to the castle.

There wasn’t much. This part of the island was mostly low hills covered with open forest. It had been hours since the drone had seen anything even as interesting as a herd of animals. Just the occasional bird, a motion in the branches that might be an animal and the mixture of trees and grassy clearings.

The sun was almost to the horizon and the shadows had lengthened and begun to blend together into the beginnings of dusk. The drone was a already headed north, back toward its home when its infrared sensor recorded a patch of anomalous heat off to the right. True to its programming, it turned away to investigate.

A quick scan found nothing in the visual band to account for the heat, no sign of sun-heated rocks or hot springs. The machine was too simple-minded to be puzzled, but it did have contingency programming for something like this. It shut down its engine, switched on its full sensor array and turned to glide over the hot spot.

Beneath the trees and magical camouflage a lone guardsman was shifting the last of his troop’s equipment into a neat pile for transport back to the Capital. He looked up as the shadow swept over him, caught a glimpse of something like a large bird and then bent again to his task.

He didn’t even consider the incident worth reporting.

It took time for the drone’s report to filter up the chain of command at Caermort. Craig had just finished a dinner of magically produced tacos and Coke when the notification popped up in a box on his screen. He glanced at it, frowned, and wiped the grease from his mouth and hands before he hit the key to get more information.

A strong source of IR and magic emissions under what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary hill at the far south of the island. Craig chewed at his lip. That wasn’t that uncommon. There were a lot of centers of magic in this world and some of them had funny effects on the non-magic sensors.

But this magic fell off fast. Right over the site it showed up strongly on the drone’s sensors. As soon as the drone moved off the spot it faded fast. A few hundred yards from the hill the magic was too weak to pick up.

Without taking his eyes off the screen, Craig balled up the taco wrappers and threw them in the direction of the wastebasket. The basket sensed the incoming object, saw that it would miss, and scuffled over to catch it. Craig was too preoccupied to notice.

That kind of fall-off was unusual. Magic usually faded out evenly, following a kind of inverse square law. Still, it was more curious than anything else and a long way away besides.

"Ah, what the shit," Craig muttered at last. He had plenty of drones and besides, there were a couple of new types of recon robots he wanted to try out.

"Well, that’s the last of them," Wiz said, looking at the spot where the guardsmen had just winked out.

"Gonna be lonely around here," Danny said from where he was lounging against the wall. June, who was standing at his side, bit her lip and nodded. Shauna had taken Ian back four or five hours ago and it was the longest June had been separated from her son since he was born.

The storeroom, which had been packed with equipment and supplies, was mostly empty now. The departing guards and staff had taken much of the material back with them. Two of the three residential wings of the complex were completely shut down and only a few rooms in the other residential section were still being used.

"Yeah, at least until tomorrow night," Wiz agreed absently. Moira had gone back earlier to reorganize the supply effort to fit the new and much smaller operation. Only Wiz, Jerry, Danny, June and the brownies were left in the complex.

And who-knows-how-many gremlins, Wiz added to himself.

"Well," said Jerry, "now that we’re alone what’s for dinner?"

"Moira left us bread, cheese and cold roast beef in the kitchen," Wiz said. "I think we’d better enjoy it while we can."

He looked sourly at the stack of waxed cardboard cartons next to him. Each one was stenciled "Meals, Ready-To-Eat" and a lot of government-sounding gobbledygook. Wiz didn’t know where Moira had gotten them, but he hoped she got back soon with some real food.

Noiselessly the metal spider crept toward the darkened buildings. At the edge of the tall grass it paused, bobbed slowly as if testing the air, and then skittered across the open space to the concealing shadows.

Carefully lifting only one leg at a time it eased its way along the wall, every sense alert for any sign of danger or alarm.