Rick Cook: The Wizardry Cursed

With his new magic Wiz was easily the most powerful mortal magician in this world. But he was as natural a klutz as he was a computer programmer. Even this simple spell would tax him to the limit.

He finished the tracing and made especially sure the lines crossed to close the figure around him. The freezing wind whipped up little eddies of dust, but it did not erase the pentagram.

Finally he surveyed his handiwork one more time and reached back into his pouch. This time he pulled out a bit of forked, twisted root. Stepping to the edge of the circle, he lifted the root to his mouth and whispered to it the words Moira and Bal-Simba had spent so long pounding into his head. He leaned over and placed it outside the circle. Then he stepped back and waited.

He had barely reached the center when the root stirred in the dust. As he watched it seemed to untwist and swell until it became a tiny brown man shape, no longer than Wiz’s thumb. It got to its knees and then to its feet and then shook itself once, as if to clear its head. It strode forward, placed its hands on its hips, threw back its head and began to shout.

Inside the circle Wiz heard nothing but the wind. He knew that the manikin was reciting a simple spell in the new magic. The spell didn’t do much, but it should be enough to attract the demon. Wiz gripped his staff harder and forced himself not to hold his breath as he watched.

Suddenly, with an earsplitting roar, the demon arrived.

A clawed foot crushed the mandrake manikin to the dust. The burning red eyes searched right and left and the horned, scaled, fanged head swiveled on the snakelike neck as it scanned for more prey. It stopped when it saw Wiz standing perhaps twenty feet away, seemingly unprotected and reeking of traces of the new magic. Without warning and without seeming to gather itself it leapt at Wiz, jaws gaping and talons spread. Its bellows rang off the surrounding stone walls.

Perhaps five feet from the human, the demon bounced. It stopped dead in mid-air and with talons scrabbling for purchase it slid slowly down the invisible barrier that lay between it and its would-be prey.

Again and again, the thing hurled itself against the invisible barrier that separated it from its prey. In spite of himself Wiz flinched and shrank back from its fury.

It was wasted effort. The demon clawed impotently at the barrier and scrabbled frantically against it, but it could not come close to penetrating it.

Wiz raised his staff and spoke. "demon debug begone exe!" he proclaimed.

The demon renewed its desperate attack on the magical barrier and its screams rose to a crescendo. Then the spell took hold. The demon became translucent. Its roars faded to the merely deafening, down through the loud and then trailed away like a locomotive whistle disappearing in the distance. It became transparent, faded to a mere outline and then it was gone.

Wiz let out his breath in a great gasping sigh and sagged against his staff.

"Okay," he said into the communications crystal. "Phase one is accomplished. Come on through and let’s get the rest of this thing over with."

There were two soft pops behind him and there were Jerry and Danny, looking disoriented and a little sick, but clutching their staffs gamely. They were burdened with packs and hung about with an assortment of pouches, crystals, strangely shaped bits of metal and other less identifiable things. In addition Danny carried a large leather sack that pulsated and moved as if the contents were alive.

The contents of the sack were to help them in their search. Everything else Danny and Jerry carried was for protection or defense. Looking them over, Wiz reflected there was probably enough magical firepower between the pair of them to defeat the Dark League ten times over. Far more than they would need for anything they were likely to meet here.

Which was fine with Wiz. He had not the slightest intention of giving anything in the City of Night an even break.

"You okay?" Wiz asked as his friends seemed to become aware of their surroundings.

"Yeah," Danny mumbled. Then he shook his head to clear it. "Boy that’s a weird feeling."

"It’ll be a good feeling when we get out of here. And the sooner we start the search the sooner that will be."

Danny nodded and bent to open the leather bag.

Hundreds of things like dirty gossamer handkerchiefs half-flapped, half-floated out of the sack and wafted off in all directions. Behind them came a half-dozen things of the same stuff about the size of a bath towel. Finally Danny reached in and pulled out a crystalline object about a foot high. The facets flashed in the pale light and the thing began buzzing weakly as it started receiving data from the searching units.

"It will take them a few minutes to get some kind of search pattern set up," Wiz said into the comm crystal. "There’s not a lot we can do until then."

"Just be careful doing nothing," Moira’s voice admonished them. "That place is not safe."

"No kidding," Wiz said, thinking of the close calls he had when he was a fugitive in the city.

"They’re spreading out fast," Jerry said, craning his neck and shielding his eyes with his hands to try to follow the searchers’ progress.

All the things in the sack were variants of the system of searching demons which had been one of Wiz’s first projects with his new magic. The smaller searchers had almost no intelligence or volition. They were passive receptors which passed information back to the bath towel things for concentration and interpretation. They in turn passed the information back to the crystal object which did the final evaluation.

Unlike Wiz’s original system, this one was tuned to look for only one object, the heart of Bale-Zur. The demons had been trained on similar demon hearts held in the vaults beneath the Capital. When they found a demon heart they would report back to the humans.

Danny poked at the rubble with his staff. "What does the heart of a demon look like anyway?"

"It’s a cloudy sphere about as big as your head," Wiz told him. "Anyway, that’s how it was described to me."

"Do not worry about identifying it," Moira’s voice came inside their heads. "Your searching demons will know it when they see it."

"If it still exists, it should be somewhere in Toth-Set-Ra’s old palace," Moira’s voice told them. "That is," she paused for a second while she translated what the Watcher’s crystal was showing her into their coordinate system, "almost straight behind you."

"I hope it is there," Wiz said. "It will make our job a lot easier."

He motioned toward the palace and all three of them gathered up their magical paraphernalia and set off.

"Hi. Uh, I’d like to see Judith Conally."

The nurse looked up from her paperwork and flashed a professional smile. "Are you a relative?"

"No, I’m a friend."

"I’m sorry, but only relatives are allowed to visit patients in the neurological unit."

"She doesn’t have any relatives out here. I’m her best friend. Can’t I please see her?"

The nurse looked him over. He wasn’t much more than twenty. A pale and soft youth with brown hair and a complexion that bore a trace of adolescent acne. He was wearing an old flight jacket with several felt-tip pens in the left sleeve pocket and a T-shirt with a picture of a warrior in a horned helmet air-brushed on it.

He had laid a three-ring notebook on the counter with a couple of library books on top.

A student, she decided. Harmless and very earnest.